More Opportunity, More Cooperation? The Behavioral Effects of Birthright Citizenship on Immigrant Youth

Christina Felfe, Martin Kocher, Helmut Rainer, Judith Saurer and Thomas Siedler
Additional contact information
Judith Saurer: ifo Institute

No 340, Economics Series from Institute for Advanced Studies

Abstract: Inequality of opportunity, particularly when overlaid with racial, ethnic, or cultural differences, increases the social distance between individuals, which is widely believed to limit the scope of cooperation. A central question, then, is how to bridge such divides. We study the effects of a major citizenship reform in Germany — the introduction of birthright citizenship on January 1, 2000 — in terms of inter-group cooperation and social segregation between immigrant and native youth. We hypothesize that endowing immigrant children with citizenship rights levels the playing field between them and their native peers, with possible spill-overs into the domain of social interactions. Our unique setup connects a large-scale lab-in-the-field experiment based on the investment game with the citizenship reform by exploiting the quasi-random assignment of citizenship rights around its cut-off date. Immigrant youth born prior to the reform display high levels of cooperation toward other immigrants, but low levels of cooperation toward natives. The introduction of birthright citizenship caused male, but not female, immigrants to significantly increase their cooperativeness toward natives. This effect is accompanied by a near-closure of the educational achievement gap between young immigrant men and their native peers.

Keywords: Citizenship; immigration; trust; experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D90 J15 K37 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 55 pages
Date: 2018-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-mig, nep-soc and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://irihs.ihs.ac.at/id/eprint/4613 First version, 2018 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: More opportunity, more cooperation? The behavioral effects of birthright citizenship on immigrant youth (2021)
Working Paper: More Opportunity, More Cooperation? The Behavioral Effects of Birthright Citizenship on Immigrant Youth (2021)
Working Paper: More Opportunity, More Cooperation? The Behavioral Effects of Birthright Citizenship on Immigrant Youth (2021)
Working Paper: More Opportunity, More Cooperation? The Behavioral Effects of Birthright Citizenship on Immigrant Youth (2018)
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:ihs:ihsesp:340

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
Institute for Advanced Studies - Library, Josefstädterstr. 39, A-1080 Vienna, Austria

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Series from Institute for Advanced Studies Josefstädterstr. 39, A-1080 Vienna, Austria. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Doris Szoncsitz ().