Research

[AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST] Tourism is generally praised for revitalizing local economies, yet it can also carry subtle political costs. In this article, I argue that contexts of persistent mobility, where social encounters are frequent but ephemeral, weaken the incentives to invest and to enforce local participation. I examine the case of the Way of Saint James (Camino de Santiago) in Spain, where a tourist boom transformed social life in small urban and rural communities. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, I show that tourist exposure reduced association density by roughly 25 percent of the sample mean and local turnout by more than 2 percentage points. Communities that host pilgrims face a contextual and compositional shock. First, hostels, by hosting pilgrims, tend to disrupt existing social routines at fixed places––such as plazas. Second, hostels attract younger, mobile residents who join the community and have less engagement in local affairs. Both effects changed the norms that enforce and sustain local participation.

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In the aftermath of globalization, Western democracies have witnessed a surge in political disaffection and radical-right support. While economic and migration shocks have been widely studied, the political effects of border liberalization remain underexplored. This paper theorizes and tests how increased border permeability can generate political discontent, even without necessarily affecting immigration or direct economic competition. We argue that open borders enable brief, routine interactions between groups across historically closed frontiers. When this occurs between regions of unequal perceived status, it can erode symbolic boundaries and foster resentment. We examine this in the context of the German–Czech border, which transformed from a militarized Cold War frontier to an internal EU border. Leveraging two moments of liberalization—the fall of the Iron Curtain (1989) and Czech EU accession (2004)—we apply difference-in-differences and event study designs using municipality-level data from Bavaria. Border liberalization led to a drop in turnout (≈ 2 pp) and a rise in radical-right support (≈ 1 pp). These findings have implications for the determinants of backlash against globalization.

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[AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST] The literature of democratic accountability has studied economic voting as a short-term electoral behavior: voters reward or punish incumbents for their economic performance and then move on. This article argues that, for newly enfranchised voters, such retrospective evaluations can permeate into partisan attachments. I argue that the state of the unemployment during an individual’s first election provides a salient cue that affects either pro- or anti-incumbent (first) vote choice, and then, accumulated electoral experience transforms this first choice into a persistent partisan affiliation. I test this argument using the European Social Survey (ESS) rounds 1––11 across 29 European countries, together with cabinet data from ParlGov and economic indicators from the World Bank. I assign each respondent the average unemployment rate (socialization unemployment) and the party holding the Prime Minister's office (socialization incumbent) during the mandate preceding their first eligibility. So, the incumbent party facing re-election in such an electoral contest. Exploiting both within-cohort cross-country and within-country cross-cohort variation with country and eligibility-cohort fixed effect, I find that a one–SD increase in socialization unemployment reduces the probability of identifying with the socialization incumbent by about 2.8 percentage points later in life. Effects are concentrated under single-party majority cabinets, where the responsibility is clearer. Among first-time voters, unemployment strongly predicts anti-incumbent voting, while PID effects emerge with accumulated electoral experience.

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[MANUSCRIPT IN PREPARATION] How does the political environment shape the intergenerational transmission of culture? Cultural transmission models predict that families substitute private socialization effort when the community supports their identity. I test such prediction using the universe of birth records in the Basque Country between 1996 and 2024. I construct a Basque Name Index––measuring how distinctively Basque each name is––and calculate first the parent-child transmission gradient based on their name distinctiveness. I show two findings. First, in municipalities with stronger nationalist support, the transmission gradient is flatter––families substitute socialization to the community. This cross-sectional pattern is consistent with the substitution prediction of Bisin and Verdier (2001). Second, this equilibrium is contingent on the political environment. The 2009 Parliamentary elections––which led, somewhat unexpectedly, to the first Basque non-nationalist government since the democratic transition––disrupted the expectations of institutional reliability. Using a triple-difference design that exploits cross-municipal variation in pre-shock nationalist support, I show that Basque families in municipalities where substitution had been strongest increased their private transmission intensity. The effect is immediate, persistent, robust to alternative specifications, and absent in a falsification test using Navarra––where no government turnover occurred. These findings suggest that cultural substitution is not a stable feature of community composition but depends on families' expectations that the political environment will continue to support the ingroup identity.

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More than two million evictions occur in the US each year, a phenomenon with profound and lasting consequences for affected families and communities. This paper examines how the closure of brick-and-mortar bank branches in the US has influenced the number of households threatened with evictions over the period 2000-2018. To overcome the potential endogeneity associated to branch closures, we adopt an instrumental variable (IV) strategy that uses bank mergers as an instrument for the distance between the population and the nearest bank branch at the census tract level. Our results show that both interstate and intercounty mergers increased the distance to the nearest bank branche. Moreover, we find that a 1 percent increase in this distance led to an increase of between 0.9 and 2.3 percent in the number of households threatened with an eviction in urban tracts. We present several robustness checks that support our results, including a matching procedure that controls for pre-existing differences between tracts exposed and unexposed to mergers. In addition, we re-estimate the model focusing on mergers in which the acquiring and the acquired banks had overlapping branches, and we consider alternative measures for financial exclusion and exposure to evictions.

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