Research

Work in progress Link to heading

Road to Sustainable Development in Sub-Saharian Africa Link to heading

With Luisito Bertinelli, Evie Graus, Jean-Francois Maystadt.

Luisito Bertinelli (University of Luxembourg) and Jean-François Maystadt (UCLouvain) are at the head of this project, in which we look at the evolution of road infrastructure in Sub-Saharian Africa in the last decades, and investigate several impacts linked to sustainable development. ​

Understanding the drivers of Cross-border mobility Link to heading

With Frédéric Docquier and Vincent Dautel

First work package of the project CRoss-border mobility, HOUSing market developments, and IneQualities (CROHOUSINQ)

In this study, we look into key forces that shape the joint decision of workers on where to live and where to work. We focus on the context of cross-border work in Luxembourg or France, using detailed data on French-Born individuals from Grand-Est. We investigate and simulate how economic shocks, especially from the labor and housing markets, influence these decisions at different education levels.

Working papers Link to heading

Migrants’ crisis in the local news: evidence from the French-Italian border. Link to heading

  • (Job market paper, under revision) Peracchi, Silvia, The Migration Crisis in the Local News: Evidence from the French-Italian Border (2022). CESifo Working Paper No. 10070, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4273444 or here.

This paper investigates the impact of local exposure to migration crisis events on the local news market. Exploiting a local setting, this study explores a policy dating June 2015, whereby French authorities introduced militarized controls at the Italian frontier. This resulted into a consistent push-back of the irregular crossings of migrants and asylum seekers to the Italian land. Combining text-analysis tools with a quasi-experimental setting, this study documents that the presence of migrants in the Italian border area was mediatically important. Yet, media slant towards anti-immigrant discourse is found to rise relatively more in the areas least directly involved by the border controls. This bias-effect is found to be driven by a demand-push for ideology in the news. Finally, slant and voting preferences share the same broad direction, and a similar pattern is also reflected in hate-crime records.

International drivers of immigration policies. Link to heading

  • With Dr. Melissa Tornari. Stage of the paper: preliminary draft available on demand.

This paper aims at assessing the international dimension of a country’s asylum policy decisions in Europe. In this context, countries’ choices may depend not only on own characteristics, but also on the decisions and characteristics of connected countries. We explore these patterns via a flexible econometric model which allows for both spatial and temporal dynamics. The paper contribute to the existing literature by proposing estimates that allow to capture spillovers, as well as feedback-effects, along various dimensions of proximity. We find evidence that countries’ acceptance rates and processing times do depend on the choices of their neighbors, and that Germany’s open-door policy announcement induced some spillover effects.

Publications Link to heading

In this paper, we investigate and find evidence of a causal link between the diversity of sports teams and their performance, in football. The study relies on a novel dataset of national football teams of European countries participating in the EUROs and the World Cup, in the qualification and the final stages, from 1970 to 2018. We make use of an algorithm to predict the players’ origins based on their surnames and allow for an asymmetric measure of diversity in the players’ origins with the use of genetic distance matrices.