Assistant Professor, Department of Business and Economics, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin
Empirical studies of racial disparities often treat race as fixed, though scholars across disciplines view it as fluid, context-dependent, and observer-specific. We study the determinants of racial perception in the labor market and its consequences for measured wage disparities. Using linked administrative data on 330,000 workers in Brazil (2003–2015), we observe three racial measures: employer-recorded race from payroll filings, self-identified race from electoral records, and phenotype from standardized photographs. Self-identified and employer-ascribed race diverge in over 20% of cases, and employers disagree in their classification of the same worker. Estimating a “race function” that captures how employers map worker characteristics into racial categories, we find that phenotype matters, but so do productivity-relevant characteristics. University-educated workers are 10 pp more likely to be classified as White than workers with the same skin tone but no high school degree. Education “whitens” workers even conditional on self-declared race, all visual cues in the photographs, and firm-by-occupation fixed effects. Conventional wage-gap estimates based on recorded race or skin tone shrink by 80–90% under a comprehensive set of controls, partly because those controls also shape racial classification. We introduce a perception-normalized disparity measure that attenuates far less, suggesting conventional estimates overstate how much productivity differences explain racial wage gaps.
Do migrants become more anti-immigration over time? How do incumbents react to new arrivals? We link large-scale survey data to local immigration flows across 138 European regions from 2002 to 2024, identifying effects via a leave-out shift-share instrument within a triple-difference design. Immigrants arrive strongly pro-immigration, but support erodes over time, halving the native–immigrant gap within two decades. Exposure to new inflows contributes to this convergence: a rising local immigrant share reduces pro-immigration attitudes for both groups, with substantially larger effects for first-generation immigrants. Low-skilled incumbents respond more to inflow size, high-skilled to newcomers’ skill composition.
This paper examines the impact of right-wing populist 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 protests held on pleasant days increase their salience and visibility by attracting larger crowds, generating more attention in traditional and social media and subsequently raising the probability of hate crimes by 8.6 percentage points. These offenses are carried out predominantly by known, recidivist, lone-actor extremists in the aftermath of the protest. Spillovers are substantial: downstream newspaper coverage of protests and social media networks transmit violence to municipalities that did not host any protest. Our findings highlight a critical externality of grass-roots populist movements: they not only drive immediate local violence but also propagate it across wider networks.
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 refugee coverage is negative and 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 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.
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.
Migration is a central driver of cultural change, yet existing evidence is dispersed across mechanisms that are rarely analyzed jointly. This paper introduces a unifying theoretical framework in which selection into migration is central: emigrants are an atypical subset of the origin population, generating immediate compositional shifts in both origin and destination countries. Over time, assimilation, dissemination, and cultural remittances may either magnify or offset these initial effects, depending on contact patterns, incentives, and diaspora connectivity. The framework organizes the empirical literature into comparable channels, clarifies the conditions under which migration produces cultural convergence or divergence, and delineates the data and research designs required to identify the underlying mechanisms.
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. I show that the results hold when restricting attention to incidents with little impact on the local infrastructure and are largest for more stressful events; primarily those that target the civilian population and involve execution and torture.
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 population in member countries of the OECD is increasing, and this article summarizes economics research on the effects of immigration in those nations. Four broad topics are addressed: labour market issues, fiscal questions, the political economy of immigration, and productivity and 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, social and cultural outcomes. Policies that are well informed, well crafted and well executed beneficially improve population welfare.
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