research

Publications

Several European countries have reformed their citizenship policies over the past decades. There is much to learn from their experience of how citizenship works; for whom it works; and what rules and policies matter for integration. The article surveys recent quasi-experimental evidence and field experiments from the social sciences on the link between eligibility rules, take-up and integration outcomes. Across countries and reforms, the evidence shows that faster access to citizenship increases take-up and improves the economic, educational, political and social integration of immigrants. Other eligibility rules like civic knowledge tests or application fees also impact who naturalizes and therefore benefits from citizenship. Birthright citizenship, which is much less common in Europe, turns out to be a powerful tool for getting second-generation immigrants off to a good start. Together, citizenship acts as a powerful catalyst benefiting immigrants as well as host countries. 

[Link to paper]


Working Papers/Work in Progress

We study whether faster access to citizenship fosters the economic integration of immigrants in the host country. Our empirical setting is Germany, which overhauled its citizenship policy and laid down explicit criteria for naturalization for the first time in 1991. To identify causal effects, we use a Local Randomization Approach and a Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design, exploiting the fact that some immigrants face shorter residency requirements than others, depending on their age of arrival. We find that a more liberal citizenship policy acts as a catalyst for integration, especially for immigrant women. Women's labor force participation increases by 9 percentage points and their earnings by 24%. We do not find any significant effects on immigrant men.


Using scraped data from the Airbnb platform in New York City alongside state-of-the-art Vision Transformers models for image classification, we show that Black hosts have a 7.2 percentage points lower occupancy rate than their White counterparts despite no differences in pricing. For Asian and Hispanic hosts, the difference from Whites is small and mostly insignificant for both occupancy rate and prices. Second, we examine the effect of an anti-discrimination policy implemented by Airbnb in 2018, which reduced the size of profile pictures on the platform. Using difference-in-differences and event studies approaches, we show that the new Airbnb policy increased the Black-White disparity by about 4 percentage points. As a reaction to the negative impact of the new policy, Black hosts start offering more basic amenities for their listings. We argue that a potential mechanism for the increase in Black-White disparity stems from the increasing guests’ uncertainty in discerning facial features from the smaller profile pictures, which positively correlate with occupancy rates. As a result, guests focus more on skin color.