The Deterrent Effect of Voting Against Minarets: Identity Utility and Foreigners' Location Choice

Michaela Slotwinski () and Alois Stutzer
Additional contact information
Michaela Slotwinski: University of Basel

No 9497, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper uses the vote on the Swiss minaret initiative as a natural experiment to identify the causal effect of negative attitudes towards immigrants on foreigners' location choices and thus indirectly on their utility. Based on a regression discontinuity design with unknown discontinuity points and administrative data on the population of foreigners, we find that the probability of their moving to a municipality that unexpectedly expressed strong reservations decreases initially by about 60 percent. The effect levels off over a period of about 5 months. Consistent with a reduction in the identity utility for immigrants in general, the reaction is not confined to Muslims, whereby high-skilled foreigners seem to be most sensitive to the newly revealed reservations.

Keywords: attitudes; foreigners; identity utility; location choice; RDD (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D83 J61 R23 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 56 pages
Date: 2015-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm, nep-mig, nep-pol, nep-upt and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published - revised version published in: Journal of Population Economics, 2019, 32 (3), 1043–1095

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp9497.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp9497

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().