Essays in Applied Economics, Migration, and Conflict

This dissertation is a collection of three independent essays in Applied Economics, Migration and Conflict. Chapter 2 focuses on the interconnectedness between labour market division, economic rents concentration, political extremism, and ethnic conflict. A natural experiment of history that occurred in the late 1960s in South Tyrol, a northernmost and predominantly German-speaking region of Italy, is exploited to investigate whether frictions in the labour market may induce a move in the voting preferences of a privileged minority group towards a more extremist political party. Chapter 3 builds on propositions from Latane’s Dynamic Social Impact Theory ´ (Latane, 1981, 1996) to analyse the evolution and diffusion ´ of anti-immigrant attitudes across European NUTS2 regions between 2002 and 2014. The identification of a spatially dependent diffusion and clustering process of anti-immigrant attitudes has a significant bearing for the understanding of the rise and fall of populist movements across Europe and changing electoral support for xenophobic parties across European regions over time. The last chapter explores the extent to which scientific migration and mobility barriers shape processes of scientific knowledge production and dissemination