Moritz Marbach
Biographic Data
| ID | 1323938 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Moritz Marbach |
| GIVEN NAMES | Moritz |
| FAMILY NAME | Marbach |
| SIGNATURE | MARBACH M |
| AFFILIATIONS | ETH Zurich |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7101-2821 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 351 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Access denied: How Bureaucrats Shape Politicians’ Incentives to Choose Restrictive Asylum Policies
Recent years have seen a surge of politicians campaigning on policies that aim to deter asylum applicants. We present a game-theoretic model in which foreign nationals consider applying for asylum and bureaucrats decide their case if they apply. We show that while policies that make the asylum application less attractive decrease the probability that foreign nationals apply, they also endogenously raise the credibility of applicants’ claims to po…
Emigration and radical right populism
An extensive literature links the rise of populist radical right (PRR) parties to immigration. We argue that another demographic trend is also significant: emigration. The departure of citizens due to internal and international emigration is a major phenomenon affecting elections via two complementary mechanisms. Emigration alters the composition of electorates, but also changes the preferences of the left behind. Empirically, we establish a posi…
The impact of private hosting on the integration of Ukrainian refugees in Germany
Amid the Ukrainian displacement crisis, private hosting of refugees in Europe has surged, yet its impact on integration remains understudied. This research examines the short- to medium-term effects of private hosting on Ukrainian refugee integration in Germany. Using data from one of the largest non-profit platforms that matches private hosts with refugees, we compare the multidimensional integration outcomes of refugees who were matched with pr…
Do Immigrants Move to Welfare? Subnational Evidence from Switzerland
The welfare magnet hypothesis holds that immigrants are likely to relocate to regions with generous welfare benefits. Although this assumption has motivated extensive reforms to immigration policy and social programs, the empirical evidence remains contested. In this study, we assess detailed administrative records from Switzerland covering the full population of social assistance recipients between 2005 and 2015. By leveraging local variations i…
Causal Effects, Migration, and Legacy Studies
Political scientists have long been interested in the persistent effects of history on contemporary behavior and attitudes. To estimate legacy effects, studies often compare people living in places that were historically exposed to some event and those that were not. Using principal stratification, we provide a formal framework to analyze how migration limits our ability to learn about the persistent effects of history from observed differences b…
Environmental Pollution and Authoritarian Politics
Authoritarian rulers fend off revolutions by stimulating the economy. However, expanding the economy can also increase environmental pollution. If citizens value clean air and water, worsening pollution has the potential to galvanize large segments of the society against the regime—which increases the risk of a revolution. While the literature has documented how concerns over the environment upend politics in democracies, we know relatively littl…
Economic Opportunities, Emigration and Exit Prisoners
How do economic opportunities abroad affect citizens’ ability to exit an authoritarian regime? This article theorizes the conditions under which authoritarian leaders will perceive emigration as a threat and use imprisonment instead of other types of anti-emigration measures to prevent mass emigration. Using data from communist East Germany's secret prisoner database that we reassembled based on archival material, the authors show that as economi…
Choosing Imputation Models
Imputing missing values is an important preprocessing step in data analysis, but the literature offers little guidance on how to choose between imputation models. This letter suggests adopting the imputation model that generates a density of imputed values most similar to those of the observed values for an incomplete variable after balancing all other covariates. We recommend stable balancing weights as a practical approach to balance covariates…
Analyzing decision records from committees
In the absence of a complete voting record, decision records are an important data source to analyze committee decision-making in various institutions. Despite the ubiquity of decision records, we know surprisingly little about how to analyze them. This paper highlights the costs in terms of bias, inefficiency, or inestimable effects when using decision instead of voting records and introduces a Bayesian structural model for the analysis of decis…
Profiling Compliers and Noncompliers for Instrumental-Variable Analysis
Instrumental-variable (IV) estimation is an essential method for applied researchers across the social and behavioral sciences who analyze randomized control trials marred by noncompliance or leverage partially exogenous treatment variation in observational studies. The potential outcome framework is a popular model to motivate the assumptions underlying the identification of the local average treatment effect (LATE) and to stratify the sample in…
Does Exposure to the Refugee Crisis Make Natives More Hostile
Although Europe has experienced unprecedented numbers of refugee arrivals in recent years, there exists almost no causal evidence regarding the impact of the refugee crisis on natives' attitudes, policy preferences, and political engagement. We exploit a natural experiment in the Aegean Sea, where Greek islands close to the Turkish coast experienced a sudden and massive increase in refugee arrivals, while similar islands slightly farther away did…
The long-term impact of employment bans on the economic integration of refugees
Temporary employment bans for asylum seekers have lasting negative consequences for their economic integration.
On imputing UNHCR data
Dyadic data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on the size of the global refugee population are widely used. However, for a large fraction of the refugee population, these data provide no information about refugees’ country of origin, which contributes to a high nominal rate of unreported values in the data. In this article, I demonstrate that two imputation approaches outperform the current standard approach, which as…
Left/Right or U? Estimating the Dimensionality of National Party Competition in Europe
Comparative studies report the rise of left- and right-wing Eurosceptic parties that have transformed national party competition in Europe toward an inverted U-shaped configuration: peripheral parties at the left and right of the party spectrum oppose while centrist parties support several features of European integration. To describe the tempo and timing of this transformation and the heterogeneity across countries, we construct a Bayesian finit…
Assessing the validity of the Manifesto Common Space Scores
Estimating Party Positions across Countries and Time—A Dynamic Latent Variable Model for Manifesto Data
This article presents a new method for estimating positions of political parties across country- and time-specific contexts by introducing a latent variable model for manifesto data. We estimate latent positions and exploit bridge observations to make the scales comparable. We also incorporate expert survey data as prior information in the estimation process to avoid ex post facto interpretation of the latent space. To illustrate the empirical co…
Does Exposure to the Refugee Crisis Make Natives More Hostile
Although Europe has experienced unprecedented numbers of refugee arrivals in recent years, there exists almost no causal evidence regarding the impact of the refugee crisis on natives' attitudes, policy preferences, and political engagement. We exploit a natural experiment in the Aegean Sea, where Greek islands close to the Turkish coast experienced a sudden and massive increase in refugee arrivals, while similar islands slightly farther away did…
Estimating Party Positions across Countries and Time—A Dynamic Latent Variable Model for Manifesto Data
This article presents a new method for estimating positions of political parties across country- and time-specific contexts by introducing a latent variable model for manifesto data. We estimate latent positions and exploit bridge observations to make the scales comparable. We also incorporate expert survey data as prior information in the estimation process to avoid ex post facto interpretation of the latent space. To illustrate the empirical co…
Profiling Compliers and Noncompliers for Instrumental-Variable Analysis
Instrumental-variable (IV) estimation is an essential method for applied researchers across the social and behavioral sciences who analyze randomized control trials marred by noncompliance or leverage partially exogenous treatment variation in observational studies. The potential outcome framework is a popular model to motivate the assumptions underlying the identification of the local average treatment effect (LATE) and to stratify the sample in…
Emigration and radical right populism
An extensive literature links the rise of populist radical right (PRR) parties to immigration. We argue that another demographic trend is also significant: emigration. The departure of citizens due to internal and international emigration is a major phenomenon affecting elections via two complementary mechanisms. Emigration alters the composition of electorates, but also changes the preferences of the left behind. Empirically, we establish a posi…
Left/Right or U? Estimating the Dimensionality of National Party Competition in Europe
Comparative studies report the rise of left- and right-wing Eurosceptic parties that have transformed national party competition in Europe toward an inverted U-shaped configuration: peripheral parties at the left and right of the party spectrum oppose while centrist parties support several features of European integration. To describe the tempo and timing of this transformation and the heterogeneity across countries, we construct a Bayesian finit…
Do Immigrants Move to Welfare? Subnational Evidence from Switzerland
The welfare magnet hypothesis holds that immigrants are likely to relocate to regions with generous welfare benefits. Although this assumption has motivated extensive reforms to immigration policy and social programs, the empirical evidence remains contested. In this study, we assess detailed administrative records from Switzerland covering the full population of social assistance recipients between 2005 and 2015. By leveraging local variations i…
Economic Opportunities, Emigration and Exit Prisoners
How do economic opportunities abroad affect citizens’ ability to exit an authoritarian regime? This article theorizes the conditions under which authoritarian leaders will perceive emigration as a threat and use imprisonment instead of other types of anti-emigration measures to prevent mass emigration. Using data from communist East Germany's secret prisoner database that we reassembled based on archival material, the authors show that as economi…
On imputing UNHCR data
Dyadic data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on the size of the global refugee population are widely used. However, for a large fraction of the refugee population, these data provide no information about refugees’ country of origin, which contributes to a high nominal rate of unreported values in the data. In this article, I demonstrate that two imputation approaches outperform the current standard approach, which as…
Assessing the validity of the Manifesto Common Space Scores
The impact of private hosting on the integration of Ukrainian refugees in Germany
Amid the Ukrainian displacement crisis, private hosting of refugees in Europe has surged, yet its impact on integration remains understudied. This research examines the short- to medium-term effects of private hosting on Ukrainian refugee integration in Germany. Using data from one of the largest non-profit platforms that matches private hosts with refugees, we compare the multidimensional integration outcomes of refugees who were matched with pr…
Causal Effects, Migration, and Legacy Studies
Political scientists have long been interested in the persistent effects of history on contemporary behavior and attitudes. To estimate legacy effects, studies often compare people living in places that were historically exposed to some event and those that were not. Using principal stratification, we provide a formal framework to analyze how migration limits our ability to learn about the persistent effects of history from observed differences b…
Environmental Pollution and Authoritarian Politics
Authoritarian rulers fend off revolutions by stimulating the economy. However, expanding the economy can also increase environmental pollution. If citizens value clean air and water, worsening pollution has the potential to galvanize large segments of the society against the regime—which increases the risk of a revolution. While the literature has documented how concerns over the environment upend politics in democracies, we know relatively littl…
Estimating Party Positions across Countries and Time—A Dynamic Latent Variable Model for Manifesto Data
This article presents a new method for estimating positions of political parties across country- and time-specific contexts by introducing a latent variable model for manifesto data. We estimate latent positions and exploit bridge observations to make the scales comparable. We also incorporate expert survey data as prior information in the estimation process to avoid ex post facto interpretation of the latent space. To illustrate the empirical co…
Left/Right or U? Estimating the Dimensionality of National Party Competition in Europe
Comparative studies report the rise of left- and right-wing Eurosceptic parties that have transformed national party competition in Europe toward an inverted U-shaped configuration: peripheral parties at the left and right of the party spectrum oppose while centrist parties support several features of European integration. To describe the tempo and timing of this transformation and the heterogeneity across countries, we construct a Bayesian finit…
Assessing the validity of the Manifesto Common Space Scores
The long-term impact of employment bans on the economic integration of refugees
Temporary employment bans for asylum seekers have lasting negative consequences for their economic integration.
On imputing UNHCR data
Dyadic data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on the size of the global refugee population are widely used. However, for a large fraction of the refugee population, these data provide no information about refugees’ country of origin, which contributes to a high nominal rate of unreported values in the data. In this article, I demonstrate that two imputation approaches outperform the current standard approach, which as…
Does Exposure to the Refugee Crisis Make Natives More Hostile
Although Europe has experienced unprecedented numbers of refugee arrivals in recent years, there exists almost no causal evidence regarding the impact of the refugee crisis on natives' attitudes, policy preferences, and political engagement. We exploit a natural experiment in the Aegean Sea, where Greek islands close to the Turkish coast experienced a sudden and massive increase in refugee arrivals, while similar islands slightly farther away did…
Profiling Compliers and Noncompliers for Instrumental-Variable Analysis
Instrumental-variable (IV) estimation is an essential method for applied researchers across the social and behavioral sciences who analyze randomized control trials marred by noncompliance or leverage partially exogenous treatment variation in observational studies. The potential outcome framework is a popular model to motivate the assumptions underlying the identification of the local average treatment effect (LATE) and to stratify the sample in…
Choosing Imputation Models
Imputing missing values is an important preprocessing step in data analysis, but the literature offers little guidance on how to choose between imputation models. This letter suggests adopting the imputation model that generates a density of imputed values most similar to those of the observed values for an incomplete variable after balancing all other covariates. We recommend stable balancing weights as a practical approach to balance covariates…
Analyzing decision records from committees
In the absence of a complete voting record, decision records are an important data source to analyze committee decision-making in various institutions. Despite the ubiquity of decision records, we know surprisingly little about how to analyze them. This paper highlights the costs in terms of bias, inefficiency, or inestimable effects when using decision instead of voting records and introduces a Bayesian structural model for the analysis of decis…
Economic Opportunities, Emigration and Exit Prisoners
How do economic opportunities abroad affect citizens’ ability to exit an authoritarian regime? This article theorizes the conditions under which authoritarian leaders will perceive emigration as a threat and use imprisonment instead of other types of anti-emigration measures to prevent mass emigration. Using data from communist East Germany's secret prisoner database that we reassembled based on archival material, the authors show that as economi…
Environmental Pollution and Authoritarian Politics
Authoritarian rulers fend off revolutions by stimulating the economy. However, expanding the economy can also increase environmental pollution. If citizens value clean air and water, worsening pollution has the potential to galvanize large segments of the society against the regime—which increases the risk of a revolution. While the literature has documented how concerns over the environment upend politics in democracies, we know relatively littl…
Do Immigrants Move to Welfare? Subnational Evidence from Switzerland
The welfare magnet hypothesis holds that immigrants are likely to relocate to regions with generous welfare benefits. Although this assumption has motivated extensive reforms to immigration policy and social programs, the empirical evidence remains contested. In this study, we assess detailed administrative records from Switzerland covering the full population of social assistance recipients between 2005 and 2015. By leveraging local variations i…
Causal Effects, Migration, and Legacy Studies
Political scientists have long been interested in the persistent effects of history on contemporary behavior and attitudes. To estimate legacy effects, studies often compare people living in places that were historically exposed to some event and those that were not. Using principal stratification, we provide a formal framework to analyze how migration limits our ability to learn about the persistent effects of history from observed differences b…
Access denied: How Bureaucrats Shape Politicians’ Incentives to Choose Restrictive Asylum Policies
Recent years have seen a surge of politicians campaigning on policies that aim to deter asylum applicants. We present a game-theoretic model in which foreign nationals consider applying for asylum and bureaucrats decide their case if they apply. We show that while policies that make the asylum application less attractive decrease the probability that foreign nationals apply, they also endogenously raise the credibility of applicants’ claims to po…
Emigration and radical right populism
An extensive literature links the rise of populist radical right (PRR) parties to immigration. We argue that another demographic trend is also significant: emigration. The departure of citizens due to internal and international emigration is a major phenomenon affecting elections via two complementary mechanisms. Emigration alters the composition of electorates, but also changes the preferences of the left behind. Empirically, we establish a posi…
The impact of private hosting on the integration of Ukrainian refugees in Germany
Amid the Ukrainian displacement crisis, private hosting of refugees in Europe has surged, yet its impact on integration remains understudied. This research examines the short- to medium-term effects of private hosting on Ukrainian refugee integration in Germany. Using data from one of the largest non-profit platforms that matches private hosts with refugees, we compare the multidimensional integration outcomes of refugees who were matched with pr…
Political science (13 works) · Economics (12 works) · Law (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (8 works) · Politics (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Demographic economics (6 works) · Development economics (6 works) · Migration and Labor Dynamics (5 works)