Refugee, Diversity and Conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa

With Prof. Dr. Luisito Bertinelli and Prof. Dr. Jean-François Maystadt.

This paper investigates how changes in diversity induced by the annual inflows of refugees at the local level affect conflict across 23 countries in sub-Saharan Africa between 2005 and 2016. Refugee-induced polarization is found to exacerbate the risk of violence at the local or individual levels. The opposite is found for refugee-induced fractionalization. The results should not be interpreted as evidence that refugees per se impact the likelihood of violence. We found a negative correlation between the number of refugees and violence. Instead, the analysis points to the risk of conflict when ethnic polarization increases in the hosting communities.

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Citation: Bertinelli, L., Cömertpay, R. and Maystadt, JF. 2022. Refugees, Diversity and Conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa. Policy Research working paper; no. WPS 10052 Washington, D.C.: World Bank Group.

With Prof. Dr. Andreas Irmen and Prof. Dr. Anastasia Litina.

This paper empirically uncovers the role of population aging as a novel determinant of societal attitudes towards immigration. In particular we document that aging has a U-shaped effect on immigrant-related attitudes. This implies that whereas relatively "young" societies are not favorable towards immigrants, nevertheless as societies "grow older" they tend to adopt more favorable attitudes towards immigrants. To test our hypothesis we conduct a multilevel analysis using a sample of individuals who reside in 25 European OECD countries over the period 2002 2019. We proxy for "societal population aging" using a measure of country-level old-age dependency ratio and we test its effect on various attitudes towards immigrants as derived from nine consecutive rounds of the European Social Survey. Our hypothesized mechanism accounting for this U-shaped effect builds on the acknowledgment that as societies grow older, the shrinking working population and the associated problems, render the labor force participation of immigrants a lucrative option. Ultimately, the economic incentives to raise the inflow of immigrants trigger an indirect shift in immigrant-related attitudes. To address potential endogeneity concerns, we use an instrumental variable approach using as an instrument the projected old age dependency ratio.

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Citation: Cömertpay, R., Andreas, I. and Litina, A. 2019. Individual Attitudes towards Immigration in Aging Populations. CESifo Working Paper Series 7565, CESifo.

This paper studies the impact of independent media network on political accountability during the Arab Spring across the Middle East and North Africa region, the Arab World. It focuses on two major media networks in the Arab world: Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya. Political accountability is proxied using principally a measure of protests. Data on both political accountability measures and the media networks derive from the Arab Barometer surveys. The regional-level analysis is based on Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine due to data availability. The study uses regional ruggedness as an instrumental variable for the non-random use of independent media among the individuals. Results are estimated using a Two-Stage least Squares (2SLS) regression analysis and indicate a positive and significant impact of independent media on political accountability. Several extensions are performed. First, the analysis is replicated for the impact of state media networks and results suggest a significant negative impact on participation to protests. Second, the impact of using independent media for public sector workers' participation to protests is compared with non-public workers. While a significant positive impact of using independent media is found among non-public workers, independent media among public workers seem not to affect their participation to protests. Some channels are tested using additional outcomes such as governmental trust, political alignment, signing petitions and general trust as proxies for political accountability.