Marco Tabellini is an assistant professor in the Business, Government, and International Economy unit and a Research Affiliate at the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR).
Professor Tabellini studies the political and the economic effects of immigration. His research also seeks to understand which factors facilitate or hinder immigrant assimilation, how the presence of different ethnic groups in a society influences inter-group relations, and to what extent migration can be a tool to foster the political and the social integration of under-represented segments of the population. To answer these questions, Marco has focused on the early twentieth century US, which was characterized by the massive inflow of Europeans and by the first migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North of the US. More recently, Marco has also analyzed the effects of the second Great Migration of African Americans between 1940 and 1970, investigating how this episode contributed to the development of the Civil Rights movement, both in the South and in the North of the United States.
Professor Tabellini earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018, and spent the academic year 2018-2019 as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Business School before joining the faculty. He also holds a B.S. and M.S. in Economics and Social Sciences from Bocconi University.
In this paper, I jointly investigate the political and the economic effects of immigration and study the causes of anti-immigrant sentiments. I exploit exogenous variation in European immigration to U.S. cities between 1910 and 1930 induced by World War I and the Immigration Acts of the 1920s as well as instrument immigrants’ location decision relying on pre-existing settlement patterns. I find that immigration triggered hostile political reactions, such as the election of more conservative legislators, higher support for anti-immigration legislation, and lower redistribution. Exploring the causes of natives’ backlash, I document that immigration increased natives’ employment, spurred industrial production, and did not generate losses even among natives working in highly exposed sectors. These findings suggest that opposition to immigration was unlikely to have economic roots. Instead, I provide evidence that natives’ political discontent was increasing in the cultural differences between immigrants and natives. Results in this paper indicate that, even when diversity is economically beneficial, it may nonetheless be socially hard to manage.
This paper documents that disenfranchisement and discrimination discouraged WWII volunteer military participation of African American men, relative to Caucasian men, after the Pearl Harbor attack. The race-gap in volunteer enlistment is most pronounced in regions where discrimination was particularly severe. There is no gap in draft enlistment anywhere. Consistent with the notion that disenfranchisement and discrimination discourage military participation, we document that forcibly interred Japanese Americans were much less likely to serve in the U.S. military than those not interred.
We test the relationship between historical immigration to the United States and political ideology today. We hypothesize that European immigrants brought with them their preferences for the welfare state, and that this had a long-lasting effect on the political ideology of US born individuals. Our analysis proceeds in three steps. First, we document that the historical presence of European immigrants is associated with a more liberal political ideology and with stronger preferences for redistribution among US born individuals today. Next, we show that this correlation is not driven by the characteristics of the counties where immigrants settled or other specific, socioeconomic immigrants' traits. Finally, we provide evidence that immigrants brought with them their preferences for the welfare state from their countries of origin. Consistent with the hypothesis that immigration left its footprint on American ideology via cultural transmission from immigrants to natives, we show that our results are stronger when inter-group contact between natives and immigrants, measured with either intermarriage or residential integration, was higher. Our findings also indicate that immigrants influenced American political ideology during one of the largest episodes of redistribution in US history – the New Deal – and that such effects persisted after the initial shock.
US voters exaggerate the differences in attitudes held by Republicans and Democrats on a range of socioeconomic and political issues. We examine the drivers and implications of such perceived partisan differences. We find that a model of stereotypes where distortions are stronger for issues that are more salient to voters captures important features of the data. First, perceived partisan differences are predictable from the actual differences across parties, in particular the relative prevalence of extreme attitudes. Second, perceived partisan differences are larger on issues that individuals consider more important. In particular, we show that the end of the Cold War in 1991, which shifted US voters’ attention away from external threats, led to an increase in perceived partisan differences in domestic issues, and more so for issues with more stereotypical partisan differences. The reverse pattern occurred after the terrorist attacks in 2001, when attention swung back towards external threats. Finally, the belief distortions we identify are quantitatively significant, and strongly predict voting turnout.
Bordalo, Pedro, Marco Tabellini, and David Yang. "Stereotypes and Politics." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 20-106, April 2020. (Revised July 2020.)
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How do social group boundaries evolve? Does the appearance of a new out-group change the in-group’s perceptions of other out-groups? We introduce a conceptual framework of context-dependent categorization, in which exposure to one minority leads to recategorization of other minorities when the former is perceived as more distant than the latter. We test this framework by studying how Mexican immigration to the U.S. affected whites’ attitudes and behaviors towards African Americans. We combine survey and crime data with a difference-in-differences design and an instrumental variables strategy. Consistent with the theory, Mexican immigration improves whites’ attitudes towards blacks, increases support for pro-black government policies, and lowers anti-black hate crimes, while simultaneously increasing prejudice against Hispanics. Immigration of groups perceived as less distant than blacks does not have similar effects. Our findings imply that changes in the size of one group can affect the entire web of inter-group relations in diverse societies.
How does the appearance of a new immigrant group affect the integration of earlier generations of migrants? We study this question in the context of the first Great Migration (1915–1930), when 1.5 million African Americans moved from the U.S. South to northern urban centers, where 30 million Europeans had arrived since 1850. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation induced by the interaction between 1900 settlements of southern-born blacks in northern cities and state-level out-migration from the U.S. South after 1910. Black arrivals increased both the effort exerted by immigrants to assimilate and their eventual Americanization. These average effects mask substantial heterogeneity: while initially less integrated groups (i.e., Southern and Eastern Europeans) exerted more assimilation effort, assimilation success was larger for those culturally closer to native whites (i.e., Western and Northern Europeans). We show that these patterns cannot be entirely explained by economic forces. Our findings are instead more consistent with a framework in which changing perceptions of outgroup distance among the majority group lower the barriers to the assimilation of less distant minorities.
Migration has long been considered one of the key mechanisms through which labor markets adjust to economic shocks. In this paper, we analyze the migration response of American workers to two of the most important shocks that have hit Western economies since the late 1990s—import competition from China and the introduction of industrial robots. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in exposure across U.S. local labor markets over time, we first verify that both shocks led to a steep reduction in manufacturing employment. Next, we present our main results and show that, on average, robots caused a sizable reduction in population size, whereas trade with China did not. The decline in population size due to robots resulted from reduced in-migration into rather than increased out-migration away from affected areas. In the second part of the paper, we explore the mechanisms behind these results. We show that the two labor market shocks differ in their propagation across industries within local labor markets: while robots caused negative spillovers to service industries, Chinese imports, if anything, favored employment growth outside of manufacturing. We provide suggestive evidence that these propagation patterns are responsible for the differential migration response.
How does the racial composition of local constituencies affect voters' preferences and politicians' behavior? We study the effects of one of the largest episodes of internal migration in US history, the 1940-1970 Great Migration of African Americans, on both demand for racial equality and supply of civil rights legislation. We predict black inflows by interacting historical settlements of southern born blacks across northern counties with differential emigration rates from different southern states after 1940. We find that black in-migration increased support for the Democratic Party and encouraged grassroots activism. Data on pro-civil rights demonstrations and historical surveys reveal that segments of the white electorate, such as Democrats and union members, supported blacks' struggle for racial equality. At the same time, backlash against civil rights erupted among Republicans and whites more exposed to racial mixing of their neighborhoods. Mirroring the responses of the electorate, Congress members representing areas more exposed to black in-migration became more supportive of civil rights legislation. Such average effects, however, mask substantial heterogeneity, as Democratic and Republican legislators became, respectively, more liberal and more conservative on racial issues. Taken together, our findings suggest that, under certain conditions, cross-race coalitions can emerge, but also that changes in the composition of the electorate can polarize both voters and politicians.
Between 1915 and 1930, during the First Great Migration, more than 1.5 million African Americans migrated from the South to the North of the United States, altering the racial profile of several northern cities for the first time in American history. I exploit this episode to study how an increase in racial heterogeneity affects the provision of public goods and city finances. I predict black in-migration by interacting 1900 settlements of southern born blacks across northern cities with variation in outmigration from the South after 1910. I find that black inflows had a strong, negative impact on both public spending and tax revenues in northern cities. The decline in tax revenues was not due to cities’ decision to cut tax rates, but was entirely driven by a reduction in property values. These findings suggest that the housing market response to black arrivals imposed a negative fiscal externality to receiving cities that, unable or unwilling to raise taxes, were forced to cut spending. Consistent with this interpretation, cities did not change the allocation of spending across categories, while the negative effects of black in-migration were smaller when controlling for the (predicted) white outflows triggered by black arrivals.
In this paper, we study the effects of immigration on natives’ marriage, fertility, and family formation across U.S. cities between 1910 and 1930. Instrumenting immigrants’ location decision by interacting national changes in migration flows across ethnic groups with pre-existing immigrants’ enclaves across U.S. cities, we find that immigration raised marriage rates and the probability of having children for young native men and women. We show that these effects were driven by the large and positive impact of immigration on native men’s employment and occupational standing, which increased the supply of “marriageable men.” We explore alternative mechanisms—changes in sex ratios, natives’ cultural responses, and displacement effects of immigrants on female employment—and provide evidence that none of them can account for a quantitatively relevant fraction of our results.
Carlana, Michela, and Marco Tabellini. "Happily Ever After: Immigration, Natives' Marriage and Fertility." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 19-004, July 2018. (Revised March 2019. Winner of European Economic Association Young Economist Award, 2018. IZA (Institute of Labor Economics) Discussion Paper Series, No. 11467, April 2018)
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We study whether economic integration fosters the process of democratization and the channels through which this might happen. Our analysis is based on a large panel dataset of countries between 1950 and 2014. We instrument actual trade with predicted trade constructed by estimating a time-varying gravity equation similar to Feyrer (2009). We find that economic integration has a positive effect on democracy, driven by trade with democratic partners and stronger for countries with lower initial levels of economic and institutional development. These results are consistent with a learning/cultural exchange process whereby economic integration promotes the spread of democracy from more to less democratic countries. We corroborate this interpretation by providing evidence against alternative mechanisms, such as income effects, human capital accumulation, and trade-induced changes in inequality.
Marco Tabellini, Michela Carlana, Matti Sarvimaki and Mikko Silliman
Citation:
Tabellini, Marco, Michela Carlana, Matti Sarvimaki, and Mikko Silliman. "Preventing Social Exclusion of Immigrants in Finland." Working Paper, 2020.
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Can emigration from less democratic and economically less developed areas induce political and economic change? We study this question in the context of the second Great Migration of African Americans (1940–1970), when more than 4 million blacks left the U.S. South and moved to the urban North. To deal with the endogeneity of black emigration, we construct a “reversed” shift-share instrument which predicts black outflows by interacting pre-determined shares of blacks born in southern counties and living in the North with observed migration flows into northern areas. Using this empirical strategy and relying on a variety of datasets assembled and digitized from historical archives, we find that black emigration reduced support for segregationist candidates in Presidential and in Democratic primary elections, and increased the share of county resources devoted to black schools. Our interpretation is that black emigration was economically costly for the white elites who reacted by making political concessions to limit the outflow of African Americans. Consistent with the idea that black departures increased labor costs in agriculture, we find that the Great Migration reduced the prevalence of tenancy and lead to farm consolidation. We conclude by documenting that the effects of black emigration on mechanization and on farm value were highly heterogeneous, and depended crucially on initial farm size.
Nicola Fontana, Marco Manacorda, Gianluca Russo and Marco Tabellini
Citation:
Fontana, Nicola, Marco Manacorda, Gianluca Russo, and Marco Tabellini. "Emigration and Long-Run Economic Development: the Effects of the Italian Mass Migration." September 2018.
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