Research

Literature has considered socio-cultural degradation and the uproot of collective identities as key drivers of the support of populist and extremist parties. While connectivity and globalization generate dynamic spaces by fostering vivid economic interactions, they might also displace previously rooted local activities, disrupting local embeddedness—the community´s social interrelations and civic engagement. Leveraging a quasi-experimental context through a difference-in-differences strategy, I analyze the effects of a massive tourism boom triggered by the international promotion of the Way of Saint James (Camino de Santiago) as a tourist route in Spain. I find that touristification adversely decreases association density by 16% of the sample mean and reduces local turnout by 1.96 percentage points. These changes are driven by two mechanisms: (a) congestion, hostels tend to crowd urban centers, the main social hubs where human interactions occur, and (b) compositional changes, which bring a younger, mobile population with fewer participation incentives.

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More than two million evictions occur in the US annually, with profound and lasting consequences for the families and communities affected. This paper examines how the closure of brick-and-mortar bank branches in the US affected the number of households threatened with evictions from 2000-2018. To overcome the potential endogeneity associated with branch closures, we adopt an instrumental variable (IV) identification strategy that uses bank mergers as an instrument of the distance between the population and bank branches at the census tract level. Our results show that interstate and intercounty mergers positively and significantly affected the distance to the closest bank branches. Moreover, we find that a 1% increase in the distance to the closest branch generated a 2.3% increase in the number of households threatened with eviction. The effects in urban tracts primarily drive this result. We complement our analysis with several robustness checks, including a matching procedure to control for pre-existing observable differences between tracts exposed and unexposed to mergers. Moreover, we re-estimate our model focusing on mergers where the acquiring and the acquired banks had overlapping branches within the same tract, and we consider different measures of financial exclusion and exposition to evictions.

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