Does bringing a marginalized group into the state raise its members' trust in democratic institutions? Uruguay's 2013 Ley 19.122, reserving eight percent of public-sector hires for Afro-descendant citizens, offers a rare test on the dimension representation theory names. Using the Uruguayan household survey and eight waves of the Latinobarómetro, we document a genuine but small first stage,...
When political leaders single out an immigrant group, does the group seek membership in the polity or withdraw from it? We show the answer depends on what membership costs. Threat raises the protective value of citizenship but lowers the value of committing to a hostile polity, so the response turns on the price of naturalizing and the strength of outside options. Using administrative data and...
Does a more generous migrant regularization regime lead to better welfare outcomes? I study this question by comparing Venezuelan migrants in Colombia and Peru using the 2024 LAPOP migrant surveys combined with nationally representative AmericasBarometer surveys of host populations. Contrary to the conventional expectation, the migrant-native gap in food insecurity is substantially larger in...
Poverty and hunger are well-established drivers of emigration, but the literature largely treats food insecurity as a standing condition rather than something that moves. This paper asks whether a sudden, economy-wide deterioration in food security shifts migration intentions, and whether it does so differently from chronic deprivation. Using the second wave of the World Bank's Phase 2 High...
Remittances are one of the largest and most stable financial inflows to developing countries, often surpassing foreign aid and foreign direct investment. While research in the area suggest remittances reduce poverty and Food Insecurity, much of it is country specific, or uses older data. This paper examines how remittances affect household food insecurity across six middle-income countries —...
Europe's job retention schemes were the largest labour market intervention in the continent's post-war history. We ask whether they insulated older workers' household finances from the health shock of COVID-19, and find that they did not. Using the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, we study 6,709 adults aged 50 and over across 26 countries who were employed before the...