Research

Job Market Paper

The Economic–Cultural Trade-Off in Attitudes toward Immigrants (Job Market Paper) (with Priyama Majumdar) [pdf]

Many countries use economic criteria in immigration policies, yet public attitudes also respond to cultural concerns. Can higher economic contributions compensate for cultural distance in public attitudes toward immigrants? To answer this question, we conduct an online experiment in the UK using a multiple price list design. Respondents require an immigrant from a culturally distant country to earn, on average, 57% more than an immigrant from a culturally close country before supporting their application for permanent residence. This number is reduced to 16% when participants learn that the distant-origin immigrant personally holds UK-typical views. Therefore, much of the initial disadvantage reflects assumptions about immigrants’ personal views inferred from their cultural origin. Incentivised tasks involving actual immigrants show similar patterns. Exploring mechanisms, we find that disclosing UK-typical views reduces cultural concerns, whereas higher income does not systematically change beliefs about an immigrant’s personal views. Our findings suggest that higher earnings can offset the disadvantage associated with cultural distance at sufficiently high levels. Communicating information on shared values directly addresses cultural concerns that are difficult to alleviate through economic criteria alone.


Other Working Papers

This paper studies whether parliamentary deliberation shapes policymaking and whether its effects depend on public exposure. We exploit quasi-random variation from a computerised ballot that determines which questions receive oral discussion during Question Hour in the Indian Parliament. Using a new dataset linking over 17,000 parliamentary questions from 2009 to 2024 to subsequent bills, committee recommendations, government actions, and newspaper coverage, we show that orally discussed issues are more closely reflected in subsequent legislation and government measures than those receiving written replies. These effects are stronger when debates receive media coverage. Using foreign terror shocks that crowd out domestic news, we find that media exposure amplifies the policy impact of deliberation. We also show that oral discussions generate new statements and proposals beyond the issues initially raised, which subsequently appear in legislative texts. Amid growing concerns about the decline of deliberative democracy worldwide, our findings highlight the impact of parliamentary discussion on policymaking, with implications for institutional design.

Work in Progress

This paper studies explicit gender targeting in Iranian recruitment and how its patterns differ between public- and private-sector hiring. Using thirteen civil-service recruitment exams from 2015 to 2025, we construct a dataset of 26,977 job postings, of which 23.6% are restricted to men and 1.8% to women. We find that job titles are the strongest predictors of male targeting, followed by hiring organisations. Skill requirements and gendered language in job descriptions are associated with targeting. Comparing these findings with over 40,000 private-sector job advertisements, we show that male targeting is less common and more stable over time in the private sector. Unlike in public-sector recruitment, employer characteristics are stronger predictors of gender targeting than job titles.


This paper studies how gender affects the public evaluation of economic research and how gender-related attitudes depend on the framing of questions. We conduct an experiment in which respondents are randomly assigned identical research attributed to either a male or a female economist and asked how convincing they find its results and policy implications. We find no statistically significant differences in evaluations, although the estimates slightly favour men. However, when asked directly, respondents reject claims favouring male economists but express uncertainty about equivalent claims favouring women. These findings suggest that expressed gender attitudes depend on how questions are framed and may not align with evaluations made when gender is not explicitly raised.


Publications