Research

Thematically, my research is focused on two broad topics: inequality and migration. Below I elaborate on the different projects I work or have worked on and how they fit into these two themes.


Attitudes toward inequality and redistributive demands

Across the world, income disparities are growing. Nevertheless, popular demands to curb such unprecedented disparities do not necessarily always follow. Understanding when and why people come to oppose large income disparities has proven to be a complex endeavor that is nevertheless crucial to be able to provide societal solutions to our increasingly unequal world.

This study investigates the impact on redistributive preferences of one pervasive yet underexplored type of shock: natural disasters. Previous research has focused on smaller, endogenous shocks that do not share two key features of disasters: they are abrupt and collective experiences. The literature on economic shocks suggests they lead to increased demand for redistribution. Nevertheless, disasters are such abrupt ruptures that they could inhibit an increase in demand for redistribution because they may trigger psychological needs to justify the status quo. Further, their collective nature may push people to substitute government-based help for community or religious-based social insurance. In light of these conflicting accounts, I argue that how surprising a disaster is determines whether it is a deterrent or a catalyst of support for redistribution. To test my argument, I link World Values Survey data to information on subnational risk to natural disasters and find that risk of surprising disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis increases demand for redistribution but risk of predictable disasters does not. The relationship is robust to controlling for a series of individual and sub-national district characteristics. An event study of earthquake incidence shows a similar pattern: more surprising earthquakes—those impacting rarely hit districts—drive increases in demand for redistribution.

Winner of the 2023 "Best article of the year" prize granted jointly by the European Consortium of Sociological Research (ECSR) and the European Sociological Review

Inequality is on the rise but demand for redistribution is not. Could disasters induced by natural hazards turn this trend around? I exploit variation in exposure to Japan’s 2011 earthquake in combination with a representative panel. I argue natural hazards are unlike other shocks because they force close experiences with socio-economic others and the rich are less likely to be antagonized due to a generalized perception that such disasters are due to forces of nature. My framework leads to different expectations than explanations based on pure self-interest or awareness about the role of luck in life. I expect close interactions with socio-economic others to increase preferences to redistribute to the poor via increased social affinity but the lack of antagonization of higher incomes to inhibit demands to ‘soak the rich’. Results are consistent with my framework and have important implications for our understanding of how catastrophes, set to become more common due to climate change, shape demand for redistribution in the 21st century.


Contemporary democratic nations sustain substantial net income inequality despite those with below-average earnings having a majority vote on issues of redistribution. A leading explanation is that inequality is acceptable to people if they find society meritocratic. Here we argue that how meritocratic a society is perceived to be has relatively little impact on the poor's support for redistribution, for two reasons: First, fairness considerations are a luxury the poor cannot afford. Second, being poor because of one's own shortcomings is more hurtful than being unlucky. We test our argument using three cross-national surveys and a preregistered experiment. Analysis of the survey data confirm the proposed interaction effect between income and perceived fairness on support for redistribution. In the experiment we exogenized income and fairness, which are endogenous in the survey evidence. Experimental results confirm the correlational findings of the surveys, showing that only the rich condition their redistributive preferences on fairness: They choose to share less if they believe their greater earnings are deserved. The poor redistribute the same amount to themselves irrespective of their meritocratic beliefs. Our findings suggest that any significant shift in support for redistribution in liberal democracies is more likely to come from a change in fairness perceptions by those whose material interests are to oppose it than by those who stand to gain from it.


Migration aspirations and decisions

Migration gets considerable attention in the media and public discourse and yet more often than not portrayals engage in inaccurate generalizations. For instance, despite common media portrayals of migration as an 'invasion' spiraling out of control, migration has consistently been part of human societies since the beginning of our species. Even though it is a rather old phenomenon, social science still has much to do to advance our scientific understanding of the complex and evolving reasons why people decide to migrate. Studying these decisions helps us paint a more nuanced picture of migration, better identify the challenges it may pose to policy as well as better understand the characteristics and needs of populations on the move.

There is surprisingly little quantitative empirical evidence on how non-economic factors impact migration aspirations. Further, women remain understudied in the field. In this paper, I tackle both oversights in the literature and investigate how gender inequality, a widespread worldwide problem, impacts women’s migration intentions. Using original survey data collected within the TRANSMIT project in Senegal and The Gambia, I provide evidence that exposure to gender violence is positively associated to high migration aspirations. In a second step, I provide an original survey experiment. Female respondents were presented a hypothetical scenario of having to choose between migrating to two different countries. The vignette manipulated the amount of money they would be able to make and the level of gender equality. Results shows the level of gender equality in destination country has an independent causal impact on respondents' choice. Taken together, my results suggest that gender inequality does impact women's migration aspirations independent of purely economic factors.


How do climate disasters shape migration aspirations? The existing evidence consists of conflicting and inconclusive findings. To address this question, we theorize the cognitive processes guiding migration decisions in the wake of these disasters. On the one hand, the link between climate disasters and migration aspirations may be driven by sudden-onset (e.g. heavy rains, storms and landslides) rather than gradual-onset events (e.g. droughts) because the devastating effect of the former may be easier to perceive. On the other hand, gradual climate disasters may be more influential because they can be perceived as more irreversible given their protracted nature. To test our hypotheses, we analyze original survey data from a representative sample of over 5,700 individuals in Senegal and the Gambia. In a regression framework, we show that individual exposure to past climate disasters predicts higher migration aspirations, where this result is also robust to controlling for objective past climate conditions. On closer inspection, we show that only individuals with experience with gradual-onset events, especially droughts, report higher migration aspirations, while experience with sudden-onset events has no comparable effect. Consistent with our regression analysis, results from an embedded survey experiment show that informational cues about future climate stress only impact the migration aspirations of individuals which have experienced gradual-onset weather events in the past. Taken together, our results have important implications for the literature on climate change and migration.


Despite growing evidence that migrants in Europe face persistent and significant discrimination across a wide range of spheres such as the housing and labor markets, we know surprisingly little about if and how perceptions of discrimination may impact the migration aspirations of potential migrants. Using original survey data collected in Senegal and The Gambia, I investigate how both perceptions of discrimination in their origin country and expectations of discrimination in Europe shape migration aspirations. I find that both matter: perceptions of discrimination in origin correlate with higher migration aspirations in general. Further, a conjoint experiment where respondents had to choose between two hypothetical destination countries with differing levels of discrimination highlights that expectations of discrimination may be more important than monetary concerns when it comes to choosing a destination.


What drives migration aspirations? Most work focuses on immediate, present-day factors. Nevertehless, growing social scientific evidence shows the relevance of historical legacies to understand a wide range of present-day phenomena. In this study, I thus investigate how the transatlantic slave trade, arguably one of the most important negative historical legacies in the Sub-saharan African context, may have impacted desires to migrate today via intergenerationally-transmitted norms and values. Building on previous work, I first theorize how the trade may have impacted local norms and folklore about migration. On the one hand, previous work argues that the trade impacted gender norms because it created female biased sex ratios that made female labor force participation more acceptable. If the trade impacted gender norms, I hypothesize it should positively impact the migration aspirations of women belonging to groups more exposed to it relative to those belonging to groups less historically exposed because they are less constrained by conservative gender norms that prescribe women staying behind. On the other hand, previous work argues that the trade increased norms of mistrust. Therefore, an alternative hypothesis is that the trade decreased both men and women’s migration aspirations of more exposed groups relative to others via increased adherence to norms that prescribe mistrust and avoiding strangers. Empirically, I use a newly available dataset on the folklore of different ethnic groups across West Africa, data on the exposure to the transatlantic slave trade by each ethnic group, and TRANSMIT data from Senegal, The Gambia, and Nigeria to test my hypotheses.


Biases and discrimination toward immigrants

Immigrants and their descendants usually face significant challenges in the destination countries. Understanding the biases and discrimination they face is an important step to be able to build fairer societies.


Fair evaluations are fundamental for equal opportunity, with teachers as gatekeepers of academic merit in educational systems. Still, identifying their direct role in reproducing or mitigating inequalities via assessments is empirically challenging, yielding inconsistent findings on teacher bias from observational and experimental studies. We test interdisciplinary theories of status characteristics beliefs, statistical discrimination, and cultural reproduction with a pre-registered factorial experiment run on a large representative sample of Spanish pre-service teachers (n=1,717). This design causally identifies, net of true academic competence, the impact of student-ascribed status characteristics—gender, migrant and class origins—and cultural capital on teacher short- and long-term assessments, improving prior studies’ limitations regarding theory testing, confounding, and power. Findings reveal teacher bias in an immediate task of essay grading favoring girls and highbrow cultural capital signals, aligning with status characteristics and cultural reproduction theories, respectively. Concerning teachers’ long-term expectations, findings hint at statistical discrimination against boys, migrant-origin, and working-class students under uncertain information. Unexpectedly, ethnic discrimination changes from teachers favoring native origin in long-term expectations to migrant origin in essay evaluations, suggesting compensatory grading practices. These findings dig deeper into the complex roots of discrimination in teacher assessments as a mechanism underlying educational (in)equality.


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