Research

This paper studies the effects of local threat on cultural and economic assimilation of refugees, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in their allocation across German regions between 2013 and 2016. We combine novel survey data on cultural preferences and economic outcomes of refugees with corresponding information on German respondents, and construct a threat index that integrates contemporaneous and historical variables. On average, refugees assimilate both culturally and economically. However, while refugees assigned to more hostile regions converge to German culture more quickly, they do not exhibit faster economic assimilation. Our evidence suggests that refugees exert more assimilation effort in response to local threat, but that higher discrimination prevents them from integrating more quickly in more hostile regions.

How does the expansion of social media in its later stages affect collective action? This paper examines the role of "late adopters" on Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in the spring of 2020. Leveraging plausibly exogenous variation in Super Spreader Events and information from over 100 million Tweets, we show that pandemic exposure increased Twitter adoption in more white, affluent, rural, and Republican leaning counties. Late adopters contribute to the diffusion of online and offline protest for BLM to new counties, mobilizing protest more effectively than existing users. However, they also drive protest for other causes and against BLM. Our evidence is consistent with the notion that newcomers bring a more diverse set of views to the platform but that existing echo chambers lead to rapid ideological sorting that facilitates protest mobilization across the ideological spectrum.  

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.

Citizens can take radical action to advance a desired political goal and form expectations about the costs and benefits to these actions based on the observed behavior of others.  How does a successful protest --a public signal about other people's preferences-- influence radical action to achieve the same goal? We examine this question in the context of the ascent of PEGIDA, Germany's most prominent right-wing movement since World War II. We combine a difference in differences strategy with variation in local weather conditions on scheduled protest days to show that protests on pleasant days attract a higher number of participants, generate more favorable coverage on social media and subsequently cause a surge in hate crimes against refugees. We provide evidence consistent with the notion that local protest and radical action are strategic complements by reducing the perceived social punishment of committing hate crimes (cost channel) and by radicalizing individuals at the margin (preference channel). Protest success diffuses through right-wing social media networks, leads to more overt and brazen forms of violence, generates counter-mobilization and kicks off a vicious cycle of violence.

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.