The Immigration Act of 1965 marked a dramatic shift in policy and one with major long term consequences for the volume and composition of immigration to the United States. Here we explore the political economy of a reform that has been overshadowed by the Civil Rights and Great Society programs....

Using novel information from the German Socio-Economic Panel for the period 1996-2011, we document that migrants with a German friend are more similar to natives than those without a local companion along several important dimensions, including engagement in social activities, concerns about the...

Immigration is one of the most hotly debated policy issues in the United States today. Despite marked divergence of opinions within political parties, several important immigration reforms were introduced in the post 1965 era. The purpose of this paper is to systematically analyze the drivers of...

This paper investigates the impact of individuals' school peers on their adult romantic relationships. In particular, we consider the effect of quasi-random variation in the share of black students within an individual's cohort on the percentage of adults' cohabiting partners that are black. We...

Integration of immigrants is a two-way process involving immigrants and the host country society. An underexplored question is how events of xenophobic violence in the host country affect the integration of immigrants. For this purpose, I exploit a unique series of anti-immigrant attacks in the...

We first confirm previous results with the German Socio-Economic Panel by Layard, et al. (2010), and obtain strong negative effects of comparison income. However, when we split the sample by age, we find quite different results for reference income. The effects on life-satisfaction are positive...

This paper addresses the link between native attitudes and return migration. We exploit the variation in xenophobia using information on media consumption by migrants in Italy. A widely documented crime provides a quasi-experimental setting to identify the impact of Italian attitudes on...

In contrast to previous results combining all ages we find positive effects of comparison income on happiness for the under 45s, and negative effects for those over 45. In the BHPS these coefficients are several times the magnitude of own income effects. In GSOEP they cancel to give no effect of...

This study explores the relationship between women's representation in political power and school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a cross-country dataset in Europe, we document a striking negative relationship between the share of female members in national governments and school...

While various empirical studies have found negative growth-effects of natural disasters, little is yet known about the microeconomic channels through which disasters might affect short- and especially long-term growth. This paper contributes to filling this gap in the literature by studying how...