Labor market concerns and support for immigration

Abstract

Do labor market concerns affect support for immigration? Using a large, representative sample of the US population, we first elicit beliefs about the labor market impact of immigration. To generate exogenous variation in beliefs, we then provide respondents in the treatment group with research evidence showing no adverse labor market impacts of immigration. Treated respondents update their beliefs and become more supportive of immigration, as measured by self-reported policy views and petition signatures. Treatment effects also persist in an obfuscated follow-up study. Our results demonstrate that information about the labor market impact of immigration causally affects support for immigration.

The ``Fake News'' Effect: Experimentally Identifying Motivated Reasoning Using Trust in News

“…As discussed later, this design also shows that motivated reasoning is hard to reconcile with utility-maximizing beliefs like those in Brunnermeier and Parker (2005); Benabou and Tirole (2011);or Mobius et al (2014). 4 Papers that find asymmetric responses to information on these topics include: Taber and Lodge (2006) [gun laws]; Alesina, Stantcheva, and Teso (2018) [upward mobility]; Cappelen, Haaland, and Tungodden (2018) [responses to taxation]; Haaland and Roth (2019) [racial labor market discrimination]; Sarsons (2017), Kunda and Sinclair (1999), and Iyengar and Westwood (2015) [gender and performance]; Alesina, Miano, and Stantcheva (2018), Haaland and Roth (2018), and Druckman, Peterson, and Slothuus (2013) [impact of immigrants]; Nyhan and Reifler (2013) and Nyhan, Reifler, and Ubel (2013) relative to others. I also test for potential confounds that may occur with this experimental design, such as if subjects systematically misreport their median belief or misinterpret the experiment's definitions of True News and Fake News, and find that the results are unlikely to be explained by these alternative hypotheses.…”

How Research Affects Policy: Experimental Evidence from 2,150 Brazilian Municipalities

“…Complementing their work, we study the extent to which academic research changes elected heads of government's beliefs; the extent to which they themselves value access to research, and how policy adoption ultimately responds to research findings. 11 It also complements recent research showing that citizens do change their policy preferences in response to evidence, even on controversial topics such as immigration (Grigorieff et al, 2016;Haaland & Roth, 2019).…”

Anticipation of COVID-19 Vaccines Reduces Social Distancing

“…We also add to a large literature studying the role of psychological factors and economic preferences in shaping health behaviors (Maurer et al, 2009;Betsch et al, 2010;Harris et al, 2010;Milkman et al, 2011;Betsch et al, 2017;Brewer et al, 2017;Galizzi and Wiesen 2018;Lau et al, 2019;Schilbach 2019;Korn et al, 2020). Last, we build on previous findings which document important effects of news and information on people's beliefs and behavior in general (Tonin, 2017;Armona et al, 2019;Haaland and Roth, 2020;Roth and Wohlfart, 2020) and particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic (Ajzenman et al, 2020;Bursztyn et al, 2020;Fetzer et al, 2020;Simonov et al, 2020).…”