D Auer
Biographic Data
| ID | 43412 |
|---|---|
| NAME | D Auer |
| GIVEN NAMES | D |
| FAMILY NAME | Auer |
| SIGNATURE | AUER D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Collegio Carlo Alberto |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4454-2365 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 180 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Depressive symptoms and populism: Evidence from European countries
In recent years, depression has entered the research agenda of political psychology, emerging as a meaningful psychological correlate of diverse political attitudes and behaviors. Surprisingly, however, its link to populism—the political phenomenon that has probably attracted most public and scholarly attention over the past several years—has not yet been studied. We address this notable blind spot and provide a first exploratory evaluation of th…
Under Attack: How Social Threats Push Negative Beliefs about Scientists in Germany
Electoral Discrimination, Party Rationale, and the Underrepresentation of Immigrant‐Origin Politicians
Immigrants and other minorities are underrepresented in politics in most Western democracies. We argue that strategically acting party gatekeepers who update their nomination strategies based on voter behavior contribute to this representation gap. Drawing on unique panel data from Swiss local elections, we find that candidates with a “foreign‐sounding” name systematically receive not only fewer votes but are also fielded on less promising list p…
Bribes and Bombs: The Effect of Corruption on Terrorism
We leverage plausibly exogenous variation in regional exposure to corruption to provide causal estimates of the impact of local political corruption on terrorist activity for a sample of 175 countries between 1970 and 2018. We find that higher levels of corruption lead to more terrorism. This result is robust to a variety of empirical modifications, including various ways in which we probe the validity of our instrumental variables approach. We a…
Angry Politics: Populism and the Erosion of Political Support during Hard Times
We argue that threat-induced anger is not a universal driver of populist attitudes and waning political support. Instead, we hypothesize that anger erodes democracy-relevant political attitudes only when a threat affects citizens’ norms and only when blame for said threat is attributed to the domestic political system. We corroborate our hypotheses using data from a unique survey experiment conducted in Germany in 2022, in which we vary the level…
Mass Emigration and the Erosion of Liberal Democracy
s In many regions of the world, liberal politics is on the retreat. This development is usually explained with reference to inherently political phenomena. We propose an alternative explanation, linking democratic backsliding to deep-reaching demographic change caused by mass emigration. We argue that because migrants tend to be more politically liberal, their departure, if quantitatively significant, can hurt liberal democracy. Empirically, we f…
Refugee migration, labor demand and local employment
Whether or not immigration negatively affects the labor market outcomes of natives is an ongoing debate. One challenge for empirical evidence is the simultaneity of supply- and demand-side effects. To isolate the demand side, we focus on refugees in Germany who are exogenously allocated to districts and excluded from the labor market. We leverage quasi-random variation in the local refugee share as an instrument to show that an influx of 1000 asy…
Experimental evidence on how implicit racial bias affects risk preferences
We ask how human behavior changes when racial discrimination is costly and when choices are risky. By asking N = 4,944 participants in Germany to form a soccer team in a series of online experiments, we measure decision-making in an accessible way. Higher costs of discrimination can reduce disparities, but we show that these costs can also trigger implicit racial bias: participants who received an additional financial incentive to select more ski…
Towards a phonological typology of the Kalahari Basin Area languages
This article reports some results of the first large-scale, comprehensive survey of the phonological systems of the Khoisan languages of the Kalahari Basin Area. These languages are famous for their large sets of click phonemes, a typologically rare characteristic otherwise found only in a limited number of languages worldwide. They are also unique because the click phonemes carry a high functional load in terms of phonemic and lexical distinctio…
Returning from greener pastures? How exposure to returnees affects migration plans
Rebel Recruitment and Migration: Theory and Evidence From Southern Senegal
We investigate whether the threat of recruitment by rebel groups spurs domestic and international migration. The existing literature on wartime displacement has largely focused on potential victims of violence. We argue that alongside potential victims, we should expect to see the out-migration of individuals who are attractive to the rebels as potential recruits. To test this hypothesis, we draw on original survey data collected in the context o…
How one gesture curbed ethnic discrimination
Members of ethnic and racial minorities across North America and Europe continue to face discrimination, for instance, when applying for jobs or seeking housing. Such unequal treatment can occur because societies categorize people into groups along social, cultural, or ethnic and racial lines that seemingly rationalize differential treatment. Research suggests that it may take generations for such differences to decline, if they change at all. He…
No sign of increased ethnic discrimination during a crisis: Evidence from the Covid-19 pandemic
When crises hit, social theory predicts increased hostility toward immigrants. We exploit the Covid-19 pandemic as a unique exogenous crisis and examine whether discrimination increased in its wake. Repeating a field experiment in the Swiss housing market in 2018 and 2020, we find no evidence of increased discrimination against the most important immigrant groups in Switzerland. Contrarily, when uncertainty dominates the market, proprietors appea…
Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss
While global patterns of human genetic diversity are increasingly well characterized, the diversity of human languages remains less systematically described. Here we outline the Grambank database. With over 400,000 data points and 2,400 languages, Grambank is the largest comparative grammatical database available. The comprehensiveness of Grambank allows us to quantify the relative effects of genealogical inheritance and geographic proximity on t…
Brexit, uncertainty, and migration decisions
We leverage the British Brexit referendum decision to leave the European Union, to demonstrate how changes in uncertainty about a country's future socio‐political condition can impact migratory behaviour. Using official bilateral migration statistics, we report an excess increase in migration from the UK to the EU of approximately 16% post‐referendum, compared to movements between the remaining EU countries over the same period. In addition, we a…
Corruption and the Desire to Leave Quasi-Experimental Evidence on Corruption as a Driver of Emigration Intentions
Whether and to what extent corruption drives emigration has received growing attention in the literature in recent years, yet the nature of the relationship remains unclear. To test causal claims, we rely on representative global survey data of more than 280,000 respondents across 67 countries from 2010 to 2014. We use two different measures of emigration intentions and individual, as well as country-level measures of corruption, and propose to i…
Compensation or competition: Bias in immigrants' access to active labour market measures
Whether participation in active labour market programmes (ALMPs) pushes individuals back into employment depends on the programme's characteristics. On the basis of encompassing registry data that allow us to control for usually unobserved employability, we find evidence of a systematic access bias whereby jobcentre caseworkers in Switzerland assign unemployed persons to activation measures based on a competition logic that is mainly driven by an…
Can signaling assimilation mitigate hiring discrimination? Evidence from a survey experiment
The Matching Hierarchies Model: Evidence from a Survey Experiment on Employers’ Hiring Intent Regarding Immigrant Applicants
We seek to understand why immigrants encounter labor market integration difficulties and thus propose a model that combines ethnic and occupational rankings to predict which candidates employers will favor for particular occupations (a matching hierarchies model). In a Swiss survey experiment, we found that employers’ evaluations of non-natives follow sociocultural distance perceptions and that a non-native background is a disadvantage mainly in …
The absent rewards of assimilation: How ethnic penalties persist in the Swiss labour market
Linking Migration Intentions with Flows: Evidence and Potential Use
In the absence of reliable, internationally available migration flow data necessary for statistical forecasting, policymakers increasingly turn to survey data on emigration intentions to evaluate future migration trends. The important assumption – i.e. that there is a measurable and systematic relationship between the intention to migrate and actual migration – has not been firmly established at the international level. We examine the association…
Language roulette - the effect of random placement on refugees' labour market integration
Placement of refugees and subsequent labour market integration within a host country represents a key challenge for policymakers and has emerged as one of the most divisive topics in the public debate. Immigration policy in Switzerland adopts random placement of asylum seekers across its different language regions. Hence, this policy allows to estimate the causal effect of language skills on employment chances, as refugees are exogenously placed …
The Signalling Value of Labour Market Programmes
Published: 30 January 2017
Why do immigrants have longer periods of unemployment? Swiss evidence
Immigrant groups, especially those originating from non‐European countries, tend to experience disadvantages in the labour market and to be overrepresented among the recipients of welfare benefits in many European countries. In the public debate, this outcome is sometimes explained with reference to migration‐related factors such as weaker work values than natives (i.e., acceptability of remaining on benefits), smaller and lower quality of inform…
Linking Migration Intentions with Flows: Evidence and Potential Use
In the absence of reliable, internationally available migration flow data necessary for statistical forecasting, policymakers increasingly turn to survey data on emigration intentions to evaluate future migration trends. The important assumption – i.e. that there is a measurable and systematic relationship between the intention to migrate and actual migration – has not been firmly established at the international level. We examine the association…
Language roulette - the effect of random placement on refugees' labour market integration
Placement of refugees and subsequent labour market integration within a host country represents a key challenge for policymakers and has emerged as one of the most divisive topics in the public debate. Immigration policy in Switzerland adopts random placement of asylum seekers across its different language regions. Hence, this policy allows to estimate the causal effect of language skills on employment chances, as refugees are exogenously placed …
The Matching Hierarchies Model: Evidence from a Survey Experiment on Employers’ Hiring Intent Regarding Immigrant Applicants
We seek to understand why immigrants encounter labor market integration difficulties and thus propose a model that combines ethnic and occupational rankings to predict which candidates employers will favor for particular occupations (a matching hierarchies model). In a Swiss survey experiment, we found that employers’ evaluations of non-natives follow sociocultural distance perceptions and that a non-native background is a disadvantage mainly in …
Mass Emigration and the Erosion of Liberal Democracy
s In many regions of the world, liberal politics is on the retreat. This development is usually explained with reference to inherently political phenomena. We propose an alternative explanation, linking democratic backsliding to deep-reaching demographic change caused by mass emigration. We argue that because migrants tend to be more politically liberal, their departure, if quantitatively significant, can hurt liberal democracy. Empirically, we f…
Why do immigrants have longer periods of unemployment? Swiss evidence
Immigrant groups, especially those originating from non‐European countries, tend to experience disadvantages in the labour market and to be overrepresented among the recipients of welfare benefits in many European countries. In the public debate, this outcome is sometimes explained with reference to migration‐related factors such as weaker work values than natives (i.e., acceptability of remaining on benefits), smaller and lower quality of inform…
Electoral Discrimination, Party Rationale, and the Underrepresentation of Immigrant‐Origin Politicians
Immigrants and other minorities are underrepresented in politics in most Western democracies. We argue that strategically acting party gatekeepers who update their nomination strategies based on voter behavior contribute to this representation gap. Drawing on unique panel data from Swiss local elections, we find that candidates with a “foreign‐sounding” name systematically receive not only fewer votes but are also fielded on less promising list p…
The absent rewards of assimilation: How ethnic penalties persist in the Swiss labour market
Rebel Recruitment and Migration: Theory and Evidence From Southern Senegal
We investigate whether the threat of recruitment by rebel groups spurs domestic and international migration. The existing literature on wartime displacement has largely focused on potential victims of violence. We argue that alongside potential victims, we should expect to see the out-migration of individuals who are attractive to the rebels as potential recruits. To test this hypothesis, we draw on original survey data collected in the context o…
Can signaling assimilation mitigate hiring discrimination? Evidence from a survey experiment
How one gesture curbed ethnic discrimination
Members of ethnic and racial minorities across North America and Europe continue to face discrimination, for instance, when applying for jobs or seeking housing. Such unequal treatment can occur because societies categorize people into groups along social, cultural, or ethnic and racial lines that seemingly rationalize differential treatment. Research suggests that it may take generations for such differences to decline, if they change at all. He…
Returning from greener pastures? How exposure to returnees affects migration plans
No sign of increased ethnic discrimination during a crisis: Evidence from the Covid-19 pandemic
When crises hit, social theory predicts increased hostility toward immigrants. We exploit the Covid-19 pandemic as a unique exogenous crisis and examine whether discrimination increased in its wake. Repeating a field experiment in the Swiss housing market in 2018 and 2020, we find no evidence of increased discrimination against the most important immigrant groups in Switzerland. Contrarily, when uncertainty dominates the market, proprietors appea…
Bribes and Bombs: The Effect of Corruption on Terrorism
We leverage plausibly exogenous variation in regional exposure to corruption to provide causal estimates of the impact of local political corruption on terrorist activity for a sample of 175 countries between 1970 and 2018. We find that higher levels of corruption lead to more terrorism. This result is robust to a variety of empirical modifications, including various ways in which we probe the validity of our instrumental variables approach. We a…
Brexit, uncertainty, and migration decisions
We leverage the British Brexit referendum decision to leave the European Union, to demonstrate how changes in uncertainty about a country's future socio‐political condition can impact migratory behaviour. Using official bilateral migration statistics, we report an excess increase in migration from the UK to the EU of approximately 16% post‐referendum, compared to movements between the remaining EU countries over the same period. In addition, we a…
Compensation or competition: Bias in immigrants' access to active labour market measures
Whether participation in active labour market programmes (ALMPs) pushes individuals back into employment depends on the programme's characteristics. On the basis of encompassing registry data that allow us to control for usually unobserved employability, we find evidence of a systematic access bias whereby jobcentre caseworkers in Switzerland assign unemployed persons to activation measures based on a competition logic that is mainly driven by an…
The Signalling Value of Labour Market Programmes
Published: 30 January 2017
Why do immigrants have longer periods of unemployment? Swiss evidence
Immigrant groups, especially those originating from non‐European countries, tend to experience disadvantages in the labour market and to be overrepresented among the recipients of welfare benefits in many European countries. In the public debate, this outcome is sometimes explained with reference to migration‐related factors such as weaker work values than natives (i.e., acceptability of remaining on benefits), smaller and lower quality of inform…
The Signalling Value of Labour Market Programmes
Published: 30 January 2017
The absent rewards of assimilation: How ethnic penalties persist in the Swiss labour market
Linking Migration Intentions with Flows: Evidence and Potential Use
In the absence of reliable, internationally available migration flow data necessary for statistical forecasting, policymakers increasingly turn to survey data on emigration intentions to evaluate future migration trends. The important assumption – i.e. that there is a measurable and systematic relationship between the intention to migrate and actual migration – has not been firmly established at the international level. We examine the association…
Language roulette - the effect of random placement on refugees' labour market integration
Placement of refugees and subsequent labour market integration within a host country represents a key challenge for policymakers and has emerged as one of the most divisive topics in the public debate. Immigration policy in Switzerland adopts random placement of asylum seekers across its different language regions. Hence, this policy allows to estimate the causal effect of language skills on employment chances, as refugees are exogenously placed …
Can signaling assimilation mitigate hiring discrimination? Evidence from a survey experiment
The Matching Hierarchies Model: Evidence from a Survey Experiment on Employers’ Hiring Intent Regarding Immigrant Applicants
We seek to understand why immigrants encounter labor market integration difficulties and thus propose a model that combines ethnic and occupational rankings to predict which candidates employers will favor for particular occupations (a matching hierarchies model). In a Swiss survey experiment, we found that employers’ evaluations of non-natives follow sociocultural distance perceptions and that a non-native background is a disadvantage mainly in …
Corruption and the Desire to Leave Quasi-Experimental Evidence on Corruption as a Driver of Emigration Intentions
Whether and to what extent corruption drives emigration has received growing attention in the literature in recent years, yet the nature of the relationship remains unclear. To test causal claims, we rely on representative global survey data of more than 280,000 respondents across 67 countries from 2010 to 2014. We use two different measures of emigration intentions and individual, as well as country-level measures of corruption, and propose to i…
Compensation or competition: Bias in immigrants' access to active labour market measures
Whether participation in active labour market programmes (ALMPs) pushes individuals back into employment depends on the programme's characteristics. On the basis of encompassing registry data that allow us to control for usually unobserved employability, we find evidence of a systematic access bias whereby jobcentre caseworkers in Switzerland assign unemployed persons to activation measures based on a competition logic that is mainly driven by an…
Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss
While global patterns of human genetic diversity are increasingly well characterized, the diversity of human languages remains less systematically described. Here we outline the Grambank database. With over 400,000 data points and 2,400 languages, Grambank is the largest comparative grammatical database available. The comprehensiveness of Grambank allows us to quantify the relative effects of genealogical inheritance and geographic proximity on t…
Brexit, uncertainty, and migration decisions
We leverage the British Brexit referendum decision to leave the European Union, to demonstrate how changes in uncertainty about a country's future socio‐political condition can impact migratory behaviour. Using official bilateral migration statistics, we report an excess increase in migration from the UK to the EU of approximately 16% post‐referendum, compared to movements between the remaining EU countries over the same period. In addition, we a…
Towards a phonological typology of the Kalahari Basin Area languages
This article reports some results of the first large-scale, comprehensive survey of the phonological systems of the Khoisan languages of the Kalahari Basin Area. These languages are famous for their large sets of click phonemes, a typologically rare characteristic otherwise found only in a limited number of languages worldwide. They are also unique because the click phonemes carry a high functional load in terms of phonemic and lexical distinctio…
Returning from greener pastures? How exposure to returnees affects migration plans
Rebel Recruitment and Migration: Theory and Evidence From Southern Senegal
We investigate whether the threat of recruitment by rebel groups spurs domestic and international migration. The existing literature on wartime displacement has largely focused on potential victims of violence. We argue that alongside potential victims, we should expect to see the out-migration of individuals who are attractive to the rebels as potential recruits. To test this hypothesis, we draw on original survey data collected in the context o…
How one gesture curbed ethnic discrimination
Members of ethnic and racial minorities across North America and Europe continue to face discrimination, for instance, when applying for jobs or seeking housing. Such unequal treatment can occur because societies categorize people into groups along social, cultural, or ethnic and racial lines that seemingly rationalize differential treatment. Research suggests that it may take generations for such differences to decline, if they change at all. He…
No sign of increased ethnic discrimination during a crisis: Evidence from the Covid-19 pandemic
When crises hit, social theory predicts increased hostility toward immigrants. We exploit the Covid-19 pandemic as a unique exogenous crisis and examine whether discrimination increased in its wake. Repeating a field experiment in the Swiss housing market in 2018 and 2020, we find no evidence of increased discrimination against the most important immigrant groups in Switzerland. Contrarily, when uncertainty dominates the market, proprietors appea…
Angry Politics: Populism and the Erosion of Political Support during Hard Times
We argue that threat-induced anger is not a universal driver of populist attitudes and waning political support. Instead, we hypothesize that anger erodes democracy-relevant political attitudes only when a threat affects citizens’ norms and only when blame for said threat is attributed to the domestic political system. We corroborate our hypotheses using data from a unique survey experiment conducted in Germany in 2022, in which we vary the level…
Mass Emigration and the Erosion of Liberal Democracy
s In many regions of the world, liberal politics is on the retreat. This development is usually explained with reference to inherently political phenomena. We propose an alternative explanation, linking democratic backsliding to deep-reaching demographic change caused by mass emigration. We argue that because migrants tend to be more politically liberal, their departure, if quantitatively significant, can hurt liberal democracy. Empirically, we f…
Refugee migration, labor demand and local employment
Whether or not immigration negatively affects the labor market outcomes of natives is an ongoing debate. One challenge for empirical evidence is the simultaneity of supply- and demand-side effects. To isolate the demand side, we focus on refugees in Germany who are exogenously allocated to districts and excluded from the labor market. We leverage quasi-random variation in the local refugee share as an instrument to show that an influx of 1000 asy…
Experimental evidence on how implicit racial bias affects risk preferences
We ask how human behavior changes when racial discrimination is costly and when choices are risky. By asking N = 4,944 participants in Germany to form a soccer team in a series of online experiments, we measure decision-making in an accessible way. Higher costs of discrimination can reduce disparities, but we show that these costs can also trigger implicit racial bias: participants who received an additional financial incentive to select more ski…
Electoral Discrimination, Party Rationale, and the Underrepresentation of Immigrant‐Origin Politicians
Immigrants and other minorities are underrepresented in politics in most Western democracies. We argue that strategically acting party gatekeepers who update their nomination strategies based on voter behavior contribute to this representation gap. Drawing on unique panel data from Swiss local elections, we find that candidates with a “foreign‐sounding” name systematically receive not only fewer votes but are also fielded on less promising list p…
Bribes and Bombs: The Effect of Corruption on Terrorism
We leverage plausibly exogenous variation in regional exposure to corruption to provide causal estimates of the impact of local political corruption on terrorist activity for a sample of 175 countries between 1970 and 2018. We find that higher levels of corruption lead to more terrorism. This result is robust to a variety of empirical modifications, including various ways in which we probe the validity of our instrumental variables approach. We a…
Depressive symptoms and populism: Evidence from European countries
In recent years, depression has entered the research agenda of political psychology, emerging as a meaningful psychological correlate of diverse political attitudes and behaviors. Surprisingly, however, its link to populism—the political phenomenon that has probably attracted most public and scholarly attention over the past several years—has not yet been studied. We address this notable blind spot and provide a first exploratory evaluation of th…
Under Attack: How Social Threats Push Negative Beliefs about Scientists in Germany
Economics (19 works) · Political science (19 works) · Demographic economics (15 works) · Migration and Labor Dynamics (12 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Immigration (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Economic growth (7 works)