Research

This paper studies the effects of local threat on the cultural assimilation and economic integration of refugees, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in their allocation across German regions between 2013 and 2016. We use representative survey data and administrative records to measure cultural preferences as well as employment, earnings and job characteristics of refugees and German residents, and construct a threat index that integrates contemporaneous and historical variables on xenophobia at the local level. We document that refugees assigned to more hostile regions converge to Germans' stated preferences more rapidly, but do not find a job more quickly and experience slower earnings growth. We provide evidence that, by heightening threat perceptions, local hostility prompts refugees to adopt German culture more quickly. However, higher discrimination in these regions slows down refugees' successful integration.

How does media coverage of minorities affect their rule compliance? Using data from 800,000 random audits at supermarket self-checkouts in Italy, we show that heightened refugee media coverage reduces under-reporting of items among shoppers born in major refugee-source countries, but not other migrants or natives. The effect is concentrated in the seven days following media exposure and is strongest when coverage is negative or highlights criminality. Results are not driven by changes in customer composition or perceived audit risk. Instead, our findings suggest that public scrutiny prompts minorities to counter negative stereotypes by increasing their compliance. 

This paper examines the impact of extremist mobilization on anti-minority violence across 10,000 German municipalities between 2015 and 2019. Exploiting variation in weather conditions on scheduled protest days, we show that right-wing rallies held in pleasant weather attract larger crowds and increase the probability of hate crimes by 12 percentage points. Locally, these protests generate media attention, provoke counter-mobilization, and trigger a rise in hate crimes unrelated to the protest itself, committed in subsequent days by recidivist lone-actor extremists. Beyond protest locations, newspaper coverage and social media networks transmit violence to other municipalities.

This paper studies how late adoption of social media influences political mobilization across space. We focus on the diffusion of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in 2020 and exploit a preceding surge in Twitter adoption to examine whether these new users spurred protest activity in U.S. counties without prior BLM protest. For identification, we construct a push-pull instrument that combines historical Twitter networks with quasi-random shocks to late adoption. Our results show that a 1% increase in new users raised the probability of protest by 0.4 percentage points and BLM-related tweeting by 0.8%. Survey evidence suggests that persuasion played a central role in spreading BLM support to new locations.

We propose a novel perspective on migration and cultural change by asking both theoretically and empirically – and from a global viewpoint – whether migration is a source of cultural convergence or divergence between home and host countries. Our theoretical model derives distinctive testable predictions as to the sign and direction of convergence for various compositional and cultural diffusion mechanisms. We use the World Value Survey for 1981-2014 to build time-varying measures of cultural similarity for a large number of country pairs and exploit within country-pair variation over time. Our results support migration-based cultural convergence, with cultural remittances as its main driver. In other words and in contrast to the populist narrative, we find that while immigrants do act as vectors of cultural diffusion, this is mostly to export the host country culture back home.

This paper examines the impact of exposure to violence during pregnancy on anthropometric and cognitive outcomes of children in the medium-run. I combine detailed household-level data on more than 36,000 children with geo-coded information on civilian casualties in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq between 2003 and 2009 and exploit within mother differences in prenatal exposure to violence. I find that one violent incident during pregnancy decreases height and weight for age scores by 0.13 standard deviations and lowers cognitive and behavioral skills of children. Leveraging information on the severity, type and perpetrator of violence, I isolate the effect of stress from access to prenatal care. The analysis reveals that stressful events, particularly those involving direct threats to personal safety (violence directed at the civilian population and involving execution and torture), exert an even larger negative impact on child health than those incidents that disrupt health infrastructure and access to prenatal care.

This paper investigates the impact of Chinese aid projects on conflict and attitudes towards China for 820 African districts between 2000 and 2012. We use detailed, geo-coded information on aid sectors, types of conflict as well as survey data on attitudes towards China and leverage two instrumental variable strategies to argue for a causal link. Our findings align with previous studies, showing that the presence of aid projects increases conflict, specifically civilian riots, in Western, Eastern, and Southern African districts. However, we discover that conflict is driven by pure financial flows in the form of budget support, i.e. aid projects without physical Chinese presence. We also find that exposure to Chinese aid in the past does not negatively impact attitudes towards China. We take this as evidence for conflict as a result of competition for resources rather than a specific animosity towards China. 

The share of the foreign-born in OECD countries is increasing, and this article summarizes economics research on the effects of immigration in those nations. Four broad topics are addressed: labor market issues, fiscal questions, the political economy of immigration, and productivity/international trade. Extreme concerns about deleterious labour market and fiscal impacts following from new immigrants are not found to be warranted. However, it is also clear that government policies and practices regarding the selection and integration of new migrants affect labour market, fiscal and social/cultural outcomes. Policies that are well informed, well crafted, and well executed beneficially improve population welfare.