Research

We experimentally study an intervention to reduce mistreatment of Filipino overseas domestic workers (DWs) by their employers. Encouraging DWs to show their employers a family photo while providing a small gift when starting employment reduced DW mistreatment, increased their job satisfaction, and increased the likelihood of contract extension. While generally unaware of the intervention, treated DWs’ families who remained in the Philippines came to view international labor migration more positively. An online experiment with potential employers suggests that the effect operates through a reduction in employers’ perceived social distance from their employees.

We analyze the impact of economic conditions at arrival on the economic integration of family-sponsored migrants in the United States. A 1 percentage point higher unemployment rate at arrival decreases annual wage income by 4% in the short run and 2% in the longer run. The loss in wage income results primarily from lower hourly wages due to occupational downgrading. Migrant and family networks help mitigate the negative labor market effects. Migrants who arrive during a recession take up occupations with higher concentrations of fellow countrypeople and are more likely to reside with family members, potentially reducing their geographical mobility.

We study a randomly-assigned program providing information on U.S. settlement for new Filipino immigrants. The intervention, a 2.5-hour pre-departure training and an accompanying paper handbook, has no effect on employment, settlement, and subjective wellbeing, but leads immigrants to acquire substantially fewer social network connections. We rationalize these findings with a simple model, showing that information and social network links are substitutes under reasonable assumptions. Consistent with the model, the treatment reduces social network links more when costs of acquiring network links are lower. Offsetting reductions in the acquisition of social network connections can hence reduce the effectiveness of information interventions.

This paper investigates how different forms of exposure to refugees affect voting for Far Right parties. I study the state of Upper Austria where many municipalities hosted asylum seekers and also experienced a massive flow of refugees crossing into Germany in 2015. Exposure to refugees passing through border municipalities increased Far Right votes by about 1.5 percentage points, which suggests that mere exposure can increase Far Right support. Conversely, contact and sustained interactions between natives and asylum seekers in hosting municipalities decreased Far Right votes by about 4 percentage points, which is in line with the intergroup contact theory.

Migration contributes to the circulation of goods, knowledge, and ideas. Using community and individual-level data from Moldova, we show that the emigration wave that started in the aftermath of the Russian crisis of 1998 strongly affected electoral outcomes and political preferences in Moldova during the following decade, eventually contributing to the fall of the last Communist government in Europe. Our results are suggestive of information transmission and cultural diffusion channels. Identification relies on the quasi-experimental context and on the differential effects arising from the fact that emigration was directed both to more democratic Western Europe and to less democratic Russia.

This paper studies how local labor market tightness and welfare benefit levels at the time of receiving protection shape refugees’ labor market integration and location choices. We exploit a sequence of reforms that generated quasi-random variation in benefit levels, together with variation in local labor market tightness across the districts and months in which refugees receive protection. We find that tighter local labor markets raise employment, while more generous benefits slightly reduce it. These employment effects persist for about 2.5 years, but both shocks have lasting impacts on internal migration. Moreover, the negative employment effect of benefits is larger in tighter labor markets. Neither shock affects the probability of emigrating from Austria.

Previous work has documented that speaking one’s native language with an accent distinct from the mainstream is associated with lower wages. In this study, we seek to estimate the causal effect of speaking with a distinctive regional accent, disentangling the effect of the accent from that of omitted variables. We collected data on workers’ speech in Germany, a country with wide variation in regional dialects. We use a variety of strategies in estimation, including an instrumental variables strategy in which the instruments are based on research findings from the linguistics of accent acquisition. All of our estimators show that speaking with a distinctive regional accent reduces wages by an amount that is comparable to the gender wage gap. We also find that workers with distinctive regional accents tend to sort away from occupations that demand high levels of face-to-face contact, consistent with various occupational sorting models.

A key problem in the literature on the economics of migration is how emigration of an individual affects households left behind. Answers to this question must confront a problem I refer to as invisible sample selection: when entire households migrate, no information about them remains in their source country. This problem occurs in addition to the question of selection of households into migration, i.e., which households send any migrants. This paper uses principal stratification to address both identification problems simultaneously for a setup with an instrumental variable for the migration of the principal migrant. I derive nonparametric bounds on the effect of migration on remaining household members under varying assumptions and discuss the assumptions implicitly made when the problem is ignored. Building on two widely cited studies, I show that transparent assumptions regarding the behavior of household members and selectivity of migrants allow identification of informative bounds but also that not adjusting for invisible selection may result in substantial bias.

We experimentally study an intervention to reduce mistreatment of Filipino overseas domestic workers (DWs) by their employers. Encouraging DWs to show their employers a family photo while providing a small gift when starting employment reduced DW mistreatment, increased their job satisfaction, and increased the likelihood of contract extension. While generally unaware of the intervention, treated DWs’ families who remained in the Philippines came to view international labor migration more positively. An online experiment with potential employers suggests that the effect operates through a reduction in employers’ perceived social distance from their employees.

We analyze the impact of economic conditions at arrival on the economic integration of family-sponsored migrants in the United States. A 1 percentage point higher unemployment rate at arrival decreases annual wage income by 4% in the short run and 2% in the longer run. The loss in wage income results primarily from lower hourly wages due to occupational downgrading. Migrant and family networks help mitigate the negative labor market effects. Migrants who arrive during a recession take up occupations with higher concentrations of fellow countrypeople and are more likely to reside with family members, potentially reducing their geographical mobility.

We study a randomly-assigned program providing information on U.S. settlement for new Filipino immigrants. The intervention, a 2.5-hour pre-departure training and an accompanying paper handbook, has no effect on employment, settlement, and subjective wellbeing, but leads immigrants to acquire substantially fewer social network connections. We rationalize these findings with a simple model, showing that information and social network links are substitutes under reasonable assumptions. Consistent with the model, the treatment reduces social network links more when costs of acquiring network links are lower. Offsetting reductions in the acquisition of social network connections can hence reduce the effectiveness of information interventions.

What is the role of general practitioners (GPs) in supporting or hindering public health efforts? We investigate the influence of vaccine-skeptic GPs on their patients' decisions to get a COVID-19 vaccination. We identify vaccine-skeptic GPs from the signatories of an open letter in which 199 Austrian physicians expressed their skepticism about COVID-19 vaccines. We examine small rural municipalities where patients choose a GP primarily based on geographic proximity. These vaccine-skeptic GPs reduced the vaccination rate by 5.6 percentage points. This estimate implies that they discouraged 7.9% of the vaccinable population. The effect appears to stem from discouragement rather than rationing vaccine access.

This paper investigates how different forms of exposure to refugees affect voting for Far Right parties. I study the state of Upper Austria where many municipalities hosted asylum seekers and also experienced a massive flow of refugees crossing into Germany in 2015. Exposure to refugees passing through border municipalities increased Far Right votes by about 1.5 percentage points, which suggests that mere exposure can increase Far Right support. Conversely, contact and sustained interactions between natives and asylum seekers in hosting municipalities decreased Far Right votes by about 4 percentage points, which is in line with the intergroup contact theory.

This article suggests a causal framework for separating individual-level treatment effects and spillover effects such as general equilibrium, interference, or interaction effects related to treatment distribution. We relax the stable unit treatment value assumption assuming away treatment-dependent interaction between study participants and permit spillover effects within aggregates, for example, regions. Based on our framework, we systematically categorize the individual-level and spillover effects considered in the previous literature and clarify the assumptions required for identification under different designs, for instance, based on randomization or selection on observables. Furthermore, we propose a novel difference-in-differences approach and apply it to a policy intervention extending unemployment benefit durations in selected regions of Austria that arguably affected ineligibles in treated regions through general equilibrium effects in local labor markets.

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.

What are the effects of on-campus recreational sports and exercise on educational outcomes of university students? We randomize financial incentives to encourage students’ participation in on-campus sports and exercise in two cohorts of college freshmen. Incentives increased participation frequency by 47% and improved grades by 0.14 standard deviations in the first cohort. The incentives were less effective in promoting participation and did not improve grades in the second cohort. In the first cohort, students primarily substituted off-campus with on-campus physical activities and seemed more able to integrate exercising with studying. The incentives appear to have improved grades by enhancing the effectiveness of studying and encouraging students to spend more time in class.

This study investigates how exposure to a field of study influences students’ major choices. If students have incomplete information, exposure potentially helps them to learn about the scope of a field as well as how well the field matches their interest and abilities. We exploit a natural experiment where university students have to write a research paper in business, economics, or law during their first year before they choose a major. Due to oversubscription of business papers, the field of the paper is assigned quasi-randomly. We find that writing in economics raises the probability of majoring in economics by 2.7 percentage points. We show further that this effect varies across subfields: the effect is driven by assignment to topics less typical of the public's perception of the field of economics, suggesting students learn through exposure that the field is broader than they thought.

Migration contributes to the circulation of goods, knowledge, and ideas. Using community and individual-level data from Moldova, we show that the emigration wave that started in the aftermath of the Russian crisis of 1998 strongly affected electoral outcomes and political preferences in Moldova during the following decade, eventually contributing to the fall of the last Communist government in Europe. Our results are suggestive of information transmission and cultural diffusion channels. Identification relies on the quasi-experimental context and on the differential effects arising from the fact that emigration was directed both to more democratic Western Europe and to less democratic Russia.

The role of curricular activities for the formation of education, health and behavioural outcomes has been widely studied. Yet, the role of extra-curricular activities has received little attention. This study analyzes the effect of participation in sports clubs—one of the most popular extra-curricular activities among children. We use alternative datasets and flexible semi-parametric estimation methods with a specific way to use the panel dimension of the data to address selection into sports. We find positive and robust effects on children’s school performance and peer relations. Crowding out of passive leisure activities can partially explain the effects.

Using administrative data on donations channeled through the Commission on Filipinos Overseas, this paper explores which host and home country factors are associated with donations made by permanent migrants to the Philippines. On the host country side, donations increase with the income level of Filipinos and with the number of hate crimes against minorities. On the home country side, donations are not well-targeted. As donations mainly flow to provinces with high emigration rates, they do not reach less developed Philippine provinces. However, the diaspora is responsive to natural disasters and channels donations to provinces when they are hit by a typhoon.

Using a simulation design that is based on empirical data, a recent study by Huber et al. (J Econom 175:1–21, 2013) finds that distance-weighted radius matching with bias adjustment as proposed in Lechner et al. (J Eur Econ Assoc 9:742–784, 2011) is competitive among a broad range of propensity score-based estimators used to correct for mean differences due to observable covariates. In this companion paper, we further investigate the finite sample behaviour of radius matching with respect to various tuning parameters. The results are intended to help the practitioner to choose suitable values of these parameters when using this method, which has been implemented in the software packages GAUSS, STATA and R.

Objectives: To assess the relationship between proximity to specific sports facilities and participation in the corresponding sports activities for adolescents in Germany. Methods: A sample of 1,768 adolescents aged 11–17 years old and living in 161 German communities was examined. Distances to the nearest sports facilities were calculated as an indicator of proximity to sports facilities using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Participation in specific leisure-time sports activities in sports clubs was assessed using a self-report questionnaire and individual-level socio-demographic variables were derived from a parent questionnaire. Community-level socio-demographics as covariates were selected from the INKAR database, in particular from indicators and maps on land development. Logistic regression analyses were conducted to examine associations between proximity to the nearest sports facilities and participation in the corresponding sports activities. Results: The logistic regression analyses showed that girls residing longer distances from the nearest gym were less likely to engage in indoor sports activities; a significant interaction between distances to gyms and level of urbanization was identified. Decomposition of the interaction term showed that for adolescent girls living in rural areas participation in indoor sports activities was positively associated with gym proximity. Proximity to tennis courts and indoor pools was not associated with participation in tennis or water sports, respectively. Conclusions: Improved proximity to gyms is likely to be more important for female adolescents living in rural areas.

We investigate whether the distance between the next sports facilities and children’s homes matter for their sports activities inside and outside of sports clubs. Our analysis is based on a large and informative cross-section of individual data on children and their families, the so-called German Health Interview and Examination Survey for Children and Adolescents data. We use a semiparametric econometric method to investigate this relationship empirically. Our results suggest that while the distance does not matter in larger towns and cities, it does matter in smaller towns and in particular on the countryside.