How does a person’s immigration status shape well-being, integration and opportunities? Immigration status is particularly high-stakes for people fleeing persecution and violence, who may face uncertainty in their ability to reside legally and move freely. Yet there is limited causal evidence on how obtaining refugee status affects refugees’ lives after arrival. In this study, we address this empirical gap by combining administrative UNHCR records linked to an original panel survey of asylum seekers and refugees in Greece conducted between 2022 and 2023. We use a difference-in-differences design to identify the impact of refugee status on labor market outcomes, integration into host communities, psychological distress and onward migration. We find that obtaining refugee status from the Greek state reduces psychological distress and improves overall integration, with the effects being mostly driven by navigational integration, while also increasing secondary movements within Europe. These results are robust to a variety of checks and specifications, providing evidence for the multidimensional impact of granting refugee status.
2026
Who likes tracking? Evidence on institutional feedback in education policy
Education is recognized as a core component of the welfare state, yet we know little about how existing institutional arrangements shape public support for education policies. We test policy feedback theory in compulsory education, a policy domain where empirical evidence is still limited. Drawing on 4,382 Swiss citizens from eight cantons, we field an innovative visual vignette experiment using directed graphs that mirror official schematics of school structures. Respondents rate their support (0–10 scale) for fictitious education systems varying across seven policy dimensions that affect educational inequality. We focus on tracking, the fundamental structuring principle of education systems, and find that, first, tracking is indeed the most consequential attribute, raising support by 1.05 points. Respondents exposed to tracking in their own canton assign an additional 0.53 points to tracked systems, which is consistent with self-reinforcing familiarity feedback, as they show higher levels of support for the visible features of the system they live under. Second, support for tracking does vary by income, education, beliefs, and values while at the same time remaining positive across all subgroups. These patterns reflect boundary conditions of the familiarity channel rather than separate mechanisms. Third, other institutional features have comparatively modest effects, if any. Our results highlight citizens’ attachment to familiar policy designs and its implications for education reform, with broader implications for the study of education as social policy.
Who deserves student finance? Results from a survey experiment in six advanced capitalist economies
with Eloisa Harris, Alyssa M. Taylor, Flavia Fossati, Juliana Chueri, Mia Katharina Gandenberger and Carlo M. Knotz
Higher-education policy is increasingly politicised across advanced western democracies, one important point of contention being the treatment of immigrant students, who are often portrayed as a ‘burden’ on higher-education systems. A second issue, made salient during the ongoing cost-of-living crisis, is students’ ability to make ends meet and the extent to which governments should provide them with financial support. While these issues are gathering scholarly attention, little is known about the demand side at the intersection of the two, namely, under which conditions immigrants are considered deserving of financial aid. We address this gap using data from original survey experiments conducted in six countries. Our main findings are twofold: First, immigrant students are generally evaluated as less deserving of financial aid than native students but can overcome this if they are top performers. Secondly, we find that this penalty for immigrant students is driven disproportionately by right-wing voters.
2024
Cash-Based Interventions Improve Multidimensional Integration Outcomes of Venezuelan Immigrants
with Achim Ahrens, Marine Casalis and Dominik Hangartner
Since 2015, over 7 million Venezuelans have been forced to leave their homes, seeking refuge predominantly in neighboring countries across Latin America and the Caribbean. The displacement is typically accompanied by vulnerability and marginalization, yet there is a scarcity of actionable evidence on how to alleviate poverty among immigrants and refugees and facilitate their economic, political, and social integration. This study evaluates the impact of a cash-based intervention (CBI) on multidimensional integration outcomes of highly vulnerable Venezuelan immigrants, predominantly women, residing in Peru. Utilizing an original panel survey of beneficiaries and the staggered rollout of the program, which provided a one-time payment of 760 soles (approximately 190 USD or 74% of the monthly minimum wage), we estimate that the CBI increased the IPL-24 index – an overall measure of immigrant integration capturing several dimensions – by at least 0.12 standard deviations. Moreover, the CBI boosted self-employment by 2 percentage points and raised the intention to emigrate from Peru by 1.2 percentage points. Additionally, our heterogeneity analysis reveals that the benefits of the fixed-amount cash payment diminish significantly with the size of the household. We discuss how these findings inform the design of future CBI programs aimed at supporting vulnerable immigrant and refugee families.
Work in Progress
Yes in My Back Yard? Deservingness and the Local Welcoming of Refugee Children in Switzerland
2026
Under review at Journal of International Migration and Integration (first revision)
Refugee resettlement—and particularly where it happens—is politically contested, with host communities widely expected to resist the arrival of newcomers nearby: a not-in-my-back-yard (NIMBY) reaction. Yet the existing literature has focused on abstract admission targets among broad, undifferentiated groups, leaving open the question of how citizens respond when they evaluate a concrete, identifiable group of refugees—a scenario much closer to the reality of actual allocation decisions. This specific-case framing, I argue, triggers deservingness-based filtering, and I test it with a survey experiment in eight Swiss cantons (N = 4,756, December 2024). I randomized respondents into two groups, both asked to evaluate refugee children—with independently randomized nationality, parental SES, mental-distress evaluation, academic performance, legal status, and length of residence—in either their own school district or in a neighboring one. Three findings stand out. First, I find that support is 13.8% higher in the own-district condition than in the neighboring one—a YIMBY pattern, the opposite of the NIMBY reaction documented by prior abstract-admission designs. Second, Swiss respondents grant Ukrainian children a premium that is roughly twice as large when they are allocated locally (+0.30 versus +0.15 points on a 0–10 scale; interaction p < 0.05). Third, consistent with a deservingness logic, the premium comes mainly from restrictive respondents, who would otherwise filter on welfare or immigration grounds; more permissive respondents show no preferential support toward Ukrainian children. These findings add to the localized-resistance literature by pointing toward deservingness as the active mechanism in specific cases, shedding light on national-origin premiums that reflect selective restrictiveness as opposed to broad sympathy toward refugees.
Access to Legal Information and Refugee Empowerment: Experimental Evidence from Greece
with Marine Casalis, Dominik Hangartner and Alexandra C. Hartman
2025
Under review at British Journal of Political Science (second revision)
Can legal empowerment support forcibly displaced people facing high levels of violence and limited incentives to report? We study engagement with legal information and its downstream impact using a randomized encouragement design with 1,707 refugees and asylum seekers in Greece. At baseline, nearly half of participants were unaware of where to seek help after experiencing violence. We randomly encouraged access to either generic legal information via a website, personalized legal information delivered through WhatsApp, or a control condition. Take-up was higher for generic than personalized information. Relative to the control group, personalized information significantly improved knowledge of exploitation and confidence in responding to violence three months later, whereas effects of generic information were smaller and statistically insignificant. We find no detectable effects on more distant outcomes, including mental health and integration. Online trace data suggests that personalized conversations provide tailored guidance and referrals, highlighting a trade-off between scalability and effectiveness.
The Hamas Attack and Immigration Attitudes in Europe: Evidence from Survey Interviews Before and After October 7, 2023
Terrorist attacks are expected to negatively shift attitudes toward immigration, yet studies of single attacks find shifts after some attacks and none after others. It remains open whether a large attack outside Europe can change attitudes toward immigration across Europe, and which attitudes change. Following the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023 and the ones that followed in France and Belgium, European governments linked these events to immigration and asylum. I analyze whether evaluations of what immigration does to a country’s economy, culture and society, and admission preferences, changed after these events. I draw on interviews from the European Social Survey in 15 countries, comparing respondents interviewed in the two weeks after the attack with those interviewed in the two weeks before. Those interviewed after October 7 showed more negative evaluations of the consequences of immigration. An index of the three consequence items shifts by −0.086 standard deviations. Notably, admission preferences did not significantly change. The culture and better-place estimates are negative in 12 of the 15 countries, albeit with single-country samples too small for most to be significant on their own. I observe a larger shift than nearly all estimates at placebo dates before October 7, but it is small and sensitive to how time trends during the fieldwork are modeled. The same set of events can thus move how people evaluate immigration without moving whom they would admit, a distinction that a single index of attitudes toward immigration would hide.
The Effects of the November 2015 Paris Attacks on Labor Market Outcomes of Arabs and Muslims in the United States
This paper examines the impact of the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks on the labor market outcomes of Arabs and Muslims residing in the United States. Employing a difference-in-differences approach with the Current Population Survey’s monthly Outgoing Rotation Group files, I find significant short-run adverse effects concentrated in the first year after the attacks. Weekly hours worked for Arab and Muslim men declined by approximately 1.0 to 1.2 hours relative to all three comparison groups. Employment rates for Arab and Muslim men also fell by approximately 2 percentage points relative to other immigrants and US-born individuals. Arab and Muslim women experienced a short-run decline in weekly earnings of approximately 7% relative to all comparison groups; however, this effect is substantially attenuated when controlling for occupation and industry, consistent with occupational and industrial downgrading whereby affected workers shifted to lower-paying jobs. The long-run estimates are generally smaller and less precisely estimated, suggesting that the adverse effects were concentrated in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.
Beyond Left and Right: Locus of Control and Education Policy Preferences
Left-right ideology and partisanship are the standard predictors of policy attitudes in political science. In this paper, we argue that locus of control—a non-cognitive trait capturing individuals’ viewpoint on whether life outcomes are a result of personal effort or external forces—is an independent predictor for understanding education policy preferences. We use original survey data from 2,912 respondents in Switzerland with two conjoint experiments to show that individuals with high internal locus of control support tracked systems significantly more than individuals with low internal locus of control. Our findings also show that this effect is specific to tracking, the distinctive meritocratic feature of education system design, and does not extend to other education system attributes. We complement our analysis with a second experiment on refugee children’s allocation to schools, showing that individuals with high external locus of control are more sensitive to geographic proximity, preferring refugee children to be allocated in their own district as opposed to a neighboring one. Our results are robust to controlling for political ideology, party affiliation, and demographic characteristics. We present attitudinal evidence showing that the connection between locus of control and tracking reflects a broader meritocratic worldview: individuals with high internal locus of control perceive more equal opportunity in the education system, are more tolerant of income inequality, and tend to oppose redistribution. All four locus of control types are present across both the entire left-right political spectrum and all types of political parties, revealing within-ideology and within-party heterogeneity that standard political predictors miss.
Swiss Teachers’ Education Policy Preferences: A Survey of Attitudes and Experimental Evidence
Teachers are the frontliners of education policy implementation, yet little systematic attention has been paid to their policy preferences in political science. We conducted a survey of 301 compulsory-education teachers across French- and German-speaking Switzerland on six highly salient education reforms and six refugee integration policy domains. Our pre-registered survey experiments test whether teachers’ attitudes are malleable based on the nationality of refugee students and information provision treatments. Our findings suggest that teachers show high levels of support for both education reform and refugee integration. Surprisingly, neither the refugee nationality framing (Ukrainian vs. Afghan origin) nor the provision of policy-relevant information are strong enough to shift teachers’ opinions on any of the 12 items we tested. Most effects are zero or at best negligibly small, as confirmed by equivalence testing. Our null results suggest that teachers hold crystallized professional opinions, which may be the result of their direct experience with the policies we studied, and are therefore resistant to the kind of survey-based interventions that have been shown to move attitudes in the general population.
Teachers as Gatekeepers of Equal Opportunity? Explaining Education Policy Preferences in Switzerland
with Meret Lütolf and Flavia Fossati
2026
Data analysis in progress
Faster Asylum Decisions and Refugee Integration: Evidence from Switzerland’s 2019 Asylum Reform
with Achim Ahrens, Laurenz Derksen and Dominik Hangartner
2026
Preliminary title; data analysis in progress
Dissertation
Policy Attitude Formation: Public Opinion, Institutional Feedback, and Exogenous Shocks PhD in Public Administration, University of Lausanne (IDHEAP), since September 2023
Committee: Flavia Fossati (University of Lausanne), Rafael Lalive (University of Lausanne), Didier Ruedin (University of Neuchâtel), Isabelle Stadelmann-Steffen (University of Bern)
Asylum granted: The integration and well-being benefits of obtaining refugee statusWorld Development, 2027
Who likes tracking? Evidence on institutional feedback in education policyJournal of European Social Policy, 2026
Who deserves student finance? Results from a survey experiment in six advanced capitalist economiesJournal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2026
Cash-Based Interventions Improve Multidimensional Integration Outcomes of Venezuelan ImmigrantsWorld Development, 2024