The Deterrent Effect of Voting Against Minarets: Identity Utility and Foreigners' Location Choice

Arbeitspapier

This paper uses the vote on the Swiss minaret initiative as a natural experiment to identify the causal effect of negative attitudes towards immigrants on foreigners' location choices and thus indirectly on their utility. Based on a regression discontinuity design with unknown discontinuity points and administrative data on the population of foreigners, we find that the probability of their moving to a municipality that unexpectedly expressed strong reservations decreases initially by about 60 percent. The effect levels off over a period of about 5 months. Consistent with a reduction in the identity utility for immigrants in general, the reaction is not confined to Muslims, whereby high-skilled foreigners seem to be most sensitive to the newly revealed reservations.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 9497

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness ; Geographic Labor Mobility; Immigrant Workers ; Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics: Regional Migration; Regional Labor Markets; Population; Neighborhood Characteristics ; Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology; Language; Social and Economic Stratification
• Subject: attitudes ; foreigners ; identity utility ; location choice ; RDD

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Slotwinski, Michaela ; Stutzer, Alois
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
• (where): Bonn
• (when): 2015

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/125001
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET