Biased Beliefs about Immigration and Economic Concerns: Evidence from Representative Experiments

Patrick Dylong and Silke Uebelmesser

No 9918, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We investigate the link between biased beliefs about immigrants, economic concerns and policy preferences. Conducting representative survey experiments with more than 8000 respondents, we first document substantial biases in respondents’ beliefs about the immigrant population in various domains. Exposure to different types of signals about immigrants reduces concerns about adverse effects of immigration on the welfare state. On the contrary, different types of signals offset their effects on concerns about increasing labor market competition. Employing a data-driven approach to uncover systematic effect heterogeneity, we find that prior beliefs about immigration explain conditional average treatment effects. While attitudinal change is thus more pronounced among individuals with pre-intervention biases about immigrants, education and attitudes towards cultural diversity are additional drivers of heterogeneity. Treatment effects on welfare state concerns persist in a five to eight week follow-up.

Keywords: immigration attitudes; biased perceptions; belief updating; welfare state; labor market; causal forest (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C90 D83 F22 H20 J15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-int, nep-lab and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Biased beliefs about immigration and economic concerns: Evidence from representative experiments (2024)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_9918

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