The TNA experience at the Paris School of Economics allowed me to work notably on two projects, one on discrimination against foreigners and another one on the minority political representation and immigrant integration with co-authors who were at the Paris School of Economics as well to work on the projects. 

The Academic Project: Minority Political Representation and Immigrant Integration. 

The first project that I worked on during this research visit was on discrimination against foreign citizens, and involved setting up a testing experiment that will start this month and last for a year. Given the nature of the testing, I won’t be able to describe this project in the blog for confidentiality reasons, but I will describe the second project that this research visit has allowed me to develop. 

In this second project, we examine the impact of minority representation in local governments on immigrants naturalization. We combine granular data on 67,620 ward-level elections of local councillors in England between 2002 and 2019 with local authority level data on the demographic composition of the population. We use a close election setting in a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to estimate the effect of electing a minority councillor that compares immigrants' naturalization in wards where a minority candidate narrowly won a seat to wards where a minority candidate narrowly lost a seat against a majority candidate. 

We find that a marginal victory of a minority candidate against a majority candidate significantly increases the share of minorities with UK citizenship, with an overall effect size of 2.3 percentage points, which is statistically significant and represents a 6% increase over the baseline. We find that a reallocation of resources from the minority local councillor to the minority population, rather than a role model or information channel, is more likely to explain the findings. 

Personal Experience

My TNA Visit When we started, this second project was just in its infancy, and the face-to-face work at the Paris School of Economics allowed us to improve this project dramatically and quickly, defining the framing of the paper, carrying out all the main and additional analyses, and writing a first draft of the paper. We also benefited from feedback from other researchers at the Paris School of Economics by presenting the project at the Paris Migration Economics seminar. This research visit also allowed me to reconnect with other researchers at the institution, with whom I will be starting new projects in the future.