Do Unions Shape Political Ideologies at Work? (with Aiko Schmeißer) [WP]
R & R AEJ: Applied
Runner-Up for the Wicksell Prize of the European Public Choice Society
Labor unions influence economic outcomes not only through bargaining with employers over work contracts but also via political activities that can profoundly shape political systems. In unionized workplaces, they may mobilize and change the ideological positions of both unionizing workers and their non-unionizing management. In this paper, we analyze the workplace-level impact of unionization on workers' and managers' political campaign contributions. We link establishment-level union election data with transaction-level campaign contributions to federal and local candidates in the United States. Using a difference-in-differences design, validated through regression discontinuity tests, we find that unionization leads to a leftward shift of campaign contributions. Unionization increases support for Democrats relative to Republicans not only among workers but especially among managers, suggesting that managers converge toward workers' political preferences. Effects are stronger in workplaces with more cooperative union-employer interactions.
Immigration, Political Ideologies and the Polarization of American Politics (with Axel Dreher, Sarah Langlotz and Chris Parsons) [WP]
We provide causal evidence showing that migration increased the polarization of politicians campaigning for the House of Representatives between 1992 and 2016. Our polarization measures derive from ideology data based on 3 million campaign contributions. Our shift-share estimates hold over the medium-run, although they wane over time. These effects are strengthened should counties host similarly educated or more culturally distant migrants. Contributors’ race, employment status and occupations play important roles. Our results hold when focusing specifically upon refugees, where we exploit the spatial and temporal variation stemming from the opening of refugee resettlement centers for the sake of causal identification.
Chinese Aid and Health at the Country and Local Level (with John Cruzatti and Axel Dreher) [Paper]
World Development (2023) Vol. 167, 106214
We investigate whether and to what extent Chinese development finance affects infant mortality, combining 92 demographic and health surveys (DHS) for a maximum of 53 countries and almost 55,000 sub-national locations over the 2002-2014 period. We address causality by instrumenting aid with a set of interacted variables. Variation over time results from indicators that measure the availability of funding in a given year. Cross-sectional variation results from a sub-national region’s “probability to receive aid.” Controlled for this probability in tandem with fixed effects for country-years and provinces, the interactions of these variables form powerful and excludable instruments. Our results show that Chinese aid increases infant mortality at sub-national scales, but decreases mortality at the country-level. In several tests, we show that this stark contrast likely results from aid being fungible within recipient countries.
Politicians’ migration narratives in the media and politics (with Tobias Großbölting)
Can refugees revitalize rural America? (with Axel Dreher, Christopher Parsons and Giovanni Peri)
Rural Internet, Identities and Governance