Irregular migrants take risks crossing borders. Border control has to balance deterrence and humanitarian motives. Exploiting georeferenced data on sea rescues for migrants crossing the Mediterranean between 2014 and 2017, this paper shows that more humanitarian rescue policy (i) increases future crossing attempts and (ii) reduces migrants’ death risk. Further, (iii) it estimates a dynamic model of border enforcement with endogenous public attention, delivering attention and policy counterfactuals. In the estimated model, temporary attention increases intensify rescue incentives. Leveraging policy outsourcing enforcement to Libyan authorities, I show policymakers’ evaluation of irregular migrants’ lives is lower than comparable estimates for citizens.
Joint with Lucia Corno and Eliana La Ferrara
Can providing information to potential migrants influence their decisions about risky and irregular migration? We conduct an experiment with over 7,000 secondary school students in Guinea, providing information through video testimonials by migrants who settled in Europe and through aggregate statistics. We implement three treatments: (i) information about the risks of the journey; (ii) information about economic outcomes in the destination country; and (iii) a combination of both. One month after the intervention, all treatments led students to update their beliefs about the risks and the economic outcomes of migration, resulting in decreased intentions to migrate. One year later, the \textit{Risk Treatment} resulted in a 51% decline in migration outside Guinea, and the effect was driven by a decrease in migration without a visa (i.e., potentially risky and irregular). These findings are consistent with the predictions of a model where individuals choose between not migrating, migrating regularly, or migrating irregularly, and where information increases the perceived cost of irregular migration, thus decreasing migration among students who cannot afford regular migration.
Joint with Abdurrahman B. Aydemir, Riccardo Franceschin, and Asli Ebru Sanlıtürk
Do migrants want to conform to the host country social norms? We examine this question in the fertility domain with an RCT evaluating the impact of receiving information about native fertility norms on the fertility preferences, intentions, and beliefs of forced migrants. The treatment reduces migrants' expectations about natives' actual and desired fertility. Information lowers the probability of intending to have a child within two years and within five years, and the ideal number of children, both of which are correlated with future pregnancies among sample households, and affects concerns about stigmatization based on family size. Effects are stronger among men and more religious individuals. In these groups, they persist even 7-8 months after the intervention. They are not driven by priming effects and point to a specific role of natives' norms. Indeed, a second treatment providing information about the fertility of migrants from the same group has no statistically significant impact on intentions and weaker effects on the ideal number of children. Our findings are consistent with a framework in which migrants are misinformed about natives’ social norms and update their beliefs when exposed to new information.
Joint with Federico Boffa, Eugenio Levi, Alberto Parmigiani, and Steven Stillman
Technological change has repeatedly reshaped labor markets and generated political conflict. Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are expected to transform work and economic systems, yet they remain marginal in party platforms and political communication. We examine whether this limited political attention reflects weak public demand, and how citizens’ policy preferences and political engagement respond when AI and automation are framed through competing political narratives. We examine these questions using a preregistered survey experiment in the United States, Germany, and Italy (N = 11,418). We document limited knowledge about AI and automation, widespread pessimism about their labor-market effects, strong demand for government intervention, and considerable willingness to sign online petitions on Change.org. These findings reveal substantial unmet demand for policy responses. We then expose respondents to optimistic, pessimistic, or balanced political narratives about the economic consequences of AI and automation. Narratives shift policy preferences in predictable directions: pessimistic messages increase support for intervention and robot taxation, while optimistic messages increase pro-market and pro-innovation views. However, narratives generally reduce political mobilization and lower support for one-sided petitions, leaving balanced positions with the strongest relative appeal. Polarization increases only among specific groups, including older respondents, NEETs, individuals with negative views of technology, and those more exposed to AI. The results suggest that public concern about AI and automation need not generate political backlash, and may instead create space for balanced policy responses.
Joint with Matteo Bizzarri and Riccardo Franceschin, European Journal of Political Economy
Resource wealth induces predation incentives but also conflict-deterring third-party involvement. As a result, the relation between resource value and conflict probability is a priori unclear. This paper studies such relation with a flexible theoretical framework involving a potential predator and a powerful third party. First, we show that, if the third party's incentives to intervene are sufficiently strong, conflict probability is hump-shaped in the resource value. Second, we theoretically establish that resource value increases the third party's incentive to side with the resource-rich defendant in case of intervention, providing another mechanism for stabilization when the resource value is high. Third, we explain how our theory relates to policy-relevant case studies involving conflict-ridden areas and powerful third parties, focusing on US and Chinese foreign policies.
Joint with Gianmarco Daniele, Marco Le Moglie, and Paolo Pinotti, The Economic Journal
We show that the War on Drugs launched by the Mexican President Felipe Calderón in 2007 pushed drug cartels into large-scale oil thefts. Municipalities that the presidential candidate’s party barely won at the local elections in 2007-2009 exhibit a larger increase in illegal oil taps over the following years, compared to municipalities in which the presidential candidate’s party barely lost the elections. Challenger cartels in the drug market leapfrog incumbent drug cartels when entering the new illegal activity, analogous to what is typically observed in legal markets. Since challengers and incumbents specialize in different criminal sectors, the expansion of challengers does not increase violence in municipalities traversed by oil pipelines. At the same time, the municipalities traversed by a pipeline witness a decrease in schooling rates.
Joint with Federico Boffa, Eugenio Levi, and Steven Stillman
Joint with Jérôme Adda
Joint with Andre Groeger, Gianmarco León-Ciliotta, and Steven Stillman