Refugees' decisions to return after conflict carry significant political and economic implications for the origin and host countries. We examine how conflict resolution, security, economic conditions, and corruption influence return decisions. To estimate the causal effect of post-war conditions, we conducted a single-profile conjoint experiment among 2543 Ukrainian refugees across 30 European countries. Respondents were asked how likely they would be to return to Ukraine under different hypothetical scenarios. Results show that territorial integrity and security guarantees are critical, while economic prospects and combating corruption also play an important role. Refugees planning to return are more responsive to different post-war scenarios, and younger respondents are particularly influenced by income opportunities, job prospects, and potential EU accession. Our findings suggest that targeted political and economic reconstruction policies can substantially influence post-conflict return. In the most optimistic scenario, the expected return rate is 47%; in the most pessimistic scenario, only 3%.

Far-right parties frequently mobilize anti-refugee sentiment during periods of high asylum migration. Prior work shows that exposure to transit routes and regional inflows tends to raise far-right support, whereas direct local contact with asylum seekers can dampen it. Yet much of the sharp rise in far-right voting around major refugee waves remains unexplained by actual inflows. I study a Dutch policy reform, the Dispersal Act, which obligated municipalities to host asylum seekers and thereby generated a sudden, plausibly exogenous increase in expected future local inflows. Comparing changes in far-right vote shares between not-yet and already hosting municipalities before the actual arrival of asylum seekers allows me to isolate the electoral effect of heightened expectations of future hosting. I find that affected municipalities experienced a substantial increase in far-right support following the Act's passage. The effect operates on both the extensive margin (whether municipalities expect to host) and the intensive margin (how many they expect to host): a one-percentage-point increase in allocated asylum-seeker share raises far-right vote shares by about 1.2 percentage points.

With the rise of the internet and smartphones, language-learning applications have become increasingly popular. Since foreign language skills enhance migrants' earning potential, the accessibility of such tools can have significant implications for international migration. This study examines the impact of low-cost language learning on (i) language acquisition, (ii) migration patterns, and (iii) migrants' language skills and integration, leveraging the staggered introduction of 84 language courses on the widely used platform Duolingo. Each course targets a directed language pair, giving rise to rich variation across country pairs over time. First, the analysis shows that course availability improved the number of languages spoken per capita in the EU by 0.07. Second, a course bridging two countries strongly increases migration intentions across that corridor. Evidence on actual migration flows to OECD countries paints a less clear picture: effects are smaller and insignificant. Third, the availability of a relevant language course upon migration boosts the share of migrants arriving with at least basic language skills with 6 percentage points and increases the probability of employment by 3 percentage points, without strongly changing the selection of migrants. Introduction of a relevant language course after arrival further enhances migrants' employment outcomes, suggesting that the availability of low-cost language learning boosts both pre- and post-arrival language learning.

Immigration is one of the most divisive political issues in many countries today. Competing narratives, circulated via the media, are crucial in shaping how immigrants' role in society is perceived. We propose a new method combining advanced natural language processing tools with dictionaries to identify sentences containing one or more of seven immigrant narrative themes and assign a sentiment to each of these. Our narrative dataset covers 107,428 newspaper articles from 70 German newspapers over the 2000 to 2019 period. Using 16 human coders to evaluate our method, we find that it clearly outperforms simple word-matching methods and sentiment dictionaries. Empirically, culture narratives are more common than economy-related narratives. Narratives related to work and entrepreneurship are particularly positive, while foreign religion and welfare narratives tend to be negative. We use three distinct events to show how different types of shocks influence narratives, decomposing sentiment shifts into theme-composition and within-theme changes.

A study published in JPOBE finding large effects of criminalization of prostitution on rape estimates an impossible RDD specification, which effectively identifies a seasonal effect rather than a discontinuity.

We analyze how mobile internet access affects desire and plans to emigrate. Our empirical analysis combines survey data on 617,402 individuals with data on worldwide 3G mobile internet rollout from 2008 to 2018. Exploiting temporal variation in 3G rollout from 2,120 subnational districts in 112 countries, we show that an increase in mobile internet access increases the desire and plans to emigrate. Using lightning incidence as an instrument provides additional evidence that the effects are causal. The effect on the desire to emigrate is particularly strong for those with secondary education. In line with our theory, an important mechanism appears to be that access to the mobile internet lowers the cost of acquiring information on potential destinations. In addition to this, increased internet access reduces perceived material well-being and trust in government. Municipal-level data from Spain shows that 3G rollout also increased actual emigration flows.

More than 53 million people are forcibly displaced across borders, with Syria, Afghanistan, and Ukraine being the main countries of origin. A major concern in receiving countries around the world is that generous social assistance may attract asylum seekers. To test how important social assistance in destination countries is for refugees' destination choice, we conducted a survey experiment among Ukrainian refugees across Europe. In the survey experiment, respondents chose between hypothetical countries that varied in labor markets, social assistance, and other potentially relevant attributes. Our results show that concerns about welfare magnets are overstated. Job opportunities are much more important for the destination country choice than social assistance. Additionally, having networks in the country and knowing its language are important.

We exploit the unique design of a repeated survey experiment among students in four countries to explore the stability of risk preferences in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Relative to a baseline before the pandemic, we find that self-assessed willingness to take risks decreased while the willingness to take risks in an incentivized lottery task increased, for the same sample of respondents. These findings suggest domain specificity of preferences that is partly reflected in the different measures.