Does access to citizenship confer socio-economic returns? Evidence from a randomized control design

Jens Hainmueller, Elisa Cascardi, Michael Hotard, Rey Koslowski, Duncan Lawrence, Vasil Yasenov and David Laitin
Additional contact information
Elisa Cascardi: Stanford University

No 8u3yv, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Based on observational studies, conventional wisdom suggests that citizenship carries economic benefits. We leverage a randomized experiment from New York where low-income registrants who wanted to become citizens entered a lottery to receive fee vouchers to naturalize. Voucher recipients were about 36 p.p. more likely to naturalize. Yet, we find no discernible effects of access to citizenship on several economic outcomes, including income, credit scores, access to credit, financial distress, and employment. Leveraging a multi-dimensional immigrant integration index, we similarly find no measurable effects on non-economic integration. However, we do find that citizenship reduces fears of deportation. Explaining our divergence from past studies, our results also reveal evidence of positive selection into citizenship, suggesting that observational studies of citizenship are susceptible to selection bias.

Date: 2023-05-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/646287df1a36883529548328/

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:osf:socarx:8u3yv

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/8u3yv

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SocArXiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().