Biased Beliefs about Immigration and Economic Concerns: Evidence from Representative Experiments

Speaker: Silke Übelmesser (University of Jena)

We investigate the link between biased beliefs about immigrants and economic concerns about immigration. Conducting representative survey experiments on more than 8000 individuals, we first document substantial biases in respondents' beliefs about the immigrant population. Exposure to different types of facts about immigrants reduces concerns about adverse effects of immigration on the welfare state. On the contrary, different types of signals can offset their effects on fears about increasing labor market competition. Employing a data-driven approach to uncover systematic effect heterogeneity, we find that prior beliefs about immigration strongly explain conditional average treatment effects. While attitudinal change is thus more pronounced among individuals who hold pre-intervention biases about immigrants, we further observe attitudes towards cultural diversity and educational background to moderate treatment effectiveness.

Silke Übelmesser is Professor of Economics at the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, holding the Chair of Economics / Public Finance since 2012. She graduated in Economics from the University of Munich and received her PhD in Economics there. Her primary research interests include topics in the area of public finance, social policy, education economics and migration with an empirical focus.