Research

How does legal inclusion affect immigrants’ assimilation efforts? This paper examines the impact of the 1915 Dow v. United States case, which classified Arab immigrants from Greater Syria as white and thus eligible for naturalization under the Naturalization Act of 1870. Using historical US census waves, cohort-based difference-in-differences, and event study analysis, I investigate how this ruling influenced the assimilation behavior of Arabs in the US. I find a significant but short-lived decline in the distinctiveness of names—measured by the Foreign Name Index (FNI)—for US-born children of Arab fathers post-1915. This decline, amounting to a 1.72-point (2.64%) decrease compared to a group generally perceived as white, indicates a shift towards more Americanized names. The response varied depending on factors such as the father’s occupation, length of stay in the US, and the size of the Arab diaspora in the state of birth. Beyond naming, I analyze intermarriage and residential integration—outcomes requiring interaction between immigrants and natives. The results show that intermarriage rates among Arab men increased by 1.48 percentage points post-1915 compared to men perceived as white, indicating greater social acceptance, while residential integration outcome is mixed. Additionally, I introduce a novel Arabic Americanization Index to capture elements of Arabic phonology, and a unique dataset of historical Arab-American newspapers, providing new directions for analysis. Unlike the usual focus on increasingly restrictive immigration policies, this paper evaluates the effects of a policy that reduced the cost of assimilation, providing insights into how such policies can affect assimilation. These findings highlight the crucial role of legal institutions in defining racial categories and promoting social inclusion.

Draft available upon request! 

Presentations: Lewis Lab Student Workshop, Harvard PE/History Tea, BU DRG, ACES Summer School, Harvard Econ History Workshop * 

This paper investigates colorism, racial discrimination based on skin color, in men’s football. Firstly, using machine learning algorithms, we extract players’ skin tones from online headshots to examine their impact on fan-based ratings and valuations. We find evidence of a skin tone penalty, where darker-skinned players face lower fan-driven market values and ratings. Secondly, using algorithm-based ratings and employing a Difference-in-Discontinuities design with geolocated penalty kicks data, we show that lighter-skinned players enjoy a premium higher by 1.25 standard deviation than their darker-skinned peers, conditional on scoring a penalty. Additionally, we find evidence that non-native players with dark skin face a double penalty. Leveraging the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment, we highlight the role of fans’ stadium attendance in algorithm-based results. The findings underscore direct skin tone discrimination in football and highlight fans’ role in perpetuating algorithmic bias. Working Paper

Updated draft coming soon! 

Presentations: PolMeth MENA (NYU AD, honorable mention), Class for Sports and Society course (NYU AD), Association for Mentoring and Inclusion in Economics (AMIE, 3rd Applied Econ Workshop), ASREC/IRES Graduate Student Workshop, Applied Economics Seminar (PSE), 16th PhD Workshop in Economics (Turin, CCA), Sport Economics Guest Lecture Series (University of Tubingen)

Iron Curtain and Big Data are two words usually used to denote completely two different eras. Yet, the context the former offers and the rich data source the latter provides, enable the causal identification of the effect of networks on migration. Academics in countries behind the Iron Curtain were strongly isolated from the rest of the world. This context poses the question of the importance of academic networks for migration post the fall of the Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain. Using Microsoft Academic Knowledge Graph, a scholarly big data source, mapping of academics’ networks is possible and information about the size and quality of their co-authorships, by location is achieved. Focusing on academics from Eastern Europe (henceforth EE) from 1980-1988 and their academic networks (1980-1988), We investigate the effect of academic network characteristics, by location, on the probability to migrate post the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and up to 2003, marking the year many EE countries held referendums or signed treaties to join the EU. The unique context ensures that there was no anticipation of the fall of the Eastern Bloc and together with the data that offers unique rich information, identification is achieved. Approximately 30k academics from EE were identified, of which 3% were migrants. The results could be explained by two channels, the cost and signaling channel. The cost channel is how the network characteristic reduces or increases the cost of migration and thus acting as a facilitator or a de-facilitator of migration. The signal channel on the other hand in which the network characteristic serves as a signal for the academic himself and his quality and his potential contribution and addition to the new host institution, thus also serving as a facilitator or a de-facilitator of migration. We find that mostly network size and quality results could be explained by the cost channel and signalling channel, respectively. Size of the network tends to be more important than the quality, which is a context-specific result. We find heterogeneous effects by fields of study that align with previous lines of research. Heterogeneous effects are explained by two things: threat of attention and arrest by KGB and the role of reputation, language, and network barriers. 

CESifo Working Paper 

Presentations: Doctoral Workshop (UCLouvain), Doctorissimes Conference (PSE), Globalization, Political Economy and Trade Thesis Research Seminar (PSE), CESifo Junior Workshop on Big Data

This paper presents a content analysis of gender stereotypes in popular song lyrics using word embeddings. We begin by explaining how we curated a novel data set comprising lyrics from popular songs in the US over the past 70 years. We then explain word embeddings, detailing both their nature and their application to our lyric corpus. Subsequently, we present a case study that examines the prevalence of gender stereotypes across various music genres. Our findings showed that while all genres exhibited stereotyping of men and women, the specific content of these stereotypes varied significantly by genre, often in surprising ways, such as that gender stereotypes in hip-hop, often perceived as being distinctly sexist, were rarely stronger in hip-hop than in other genres. Finally, we reflect on the strengths and limitations of using word embeddings to study music lyrics and provide suggestions for their best application to sociological questions.

Submitted to the Bulletin of Sociological Methodology

How do the cultural preferences of parents shape the labor market outcomes of their children? The literature has mainly focused on proving the existence of this intergenerational transmission of cultural preferences and its influence on children’s long-run outcomes. However, there is a lack of understanding of the role of these inherited cultural preferences on children’s educational and occupational choices that ultimately lead to these outcomes. We leverage rich Swedish administrative data on university applications and labor market outcomes combined with structural modeling to address this research gap. Exploiting the cross-country variation in culturally linked risk preferences provided by the diverse pool of immigrants to Sweden, we study the importance of the risk profile of university-major choices among second-generation migrants and how the risk preferences of their parents’ birth countries affect migrant children’s sensitivity to these risk profiles. As a next step, we will study the long-term labor market consequences of these choices, both at the individual level and for aggregate welfare.

We have obtained ethical approval from the Swedish Ethical Review Authority. Using successful grant applications from ANR-17-EURE-00 and support from Rothschild Migration Chair, we have acquired registry data from Statistics Sweden. 

Draft coming soon. 

Presentations: Petit Séminaire Informel de la Paris School of Economics, Growth Lab (Harvard), Swedish Institute for Social Research Lunch Seminar, Stockholm University Demography Unit Colloquium, Stockholm University Economics Department Lunch Seminar

This project aims to study the "sociology of innovation"; an adaptation of the sociology of industry by Granovetter (1998) by focusing on Germans who arrived in the US post the failed German revolution of 1848. The German failed revolution of 1848 marks the dividing line between early industrialization and the industrial revolution. In the Second Industrial Revolution, Germany was a pioneer in chemistry, steel, and machinery. Thus, observing Germans arriving from 1848 onwards, we can study the role of know-how, its transmission mechanisms, what matters for inventors, what happens to occupations of immigrants, what's the role of different skill composition, and quantify the impact on US innovation. 

We are using the full sample US historical census, ship lists containing 4 million Germans that arrived in the US from 1850 to 1897 (containing information on occupations at home), yearbooks of R&D labs, and historical patent data (1790-2010). 

More updates soon!