From burqa ban to minaret ban, from right to detain suspected illegal immigrants to restricting the help to migrants, the number of social laws specifically targeting a tiny proportion of citizens has raised in recent years across Western democracies. These symbolic policies, we show, are far...

wo (non-exhaustive) conditions are necessary for knowledge accumulation: unbiasedness and comparability. Research designs should be unbiased so that researchers obtain correct estimates of an underlying quantity. Empirical specifications should permit comparability so that researchers measure...