Selected Working Papers (Drafts available upon request)

Andrew S. Rosenberg, "Shades of Perception: Non-White Refugee Flows and Migration Policy Restrictiveness." 

Abstract: Is there a policy backlash to non-white refugees? Differential reactions to the 2015 European refugee “crisis” and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine underscore the unequal treatment experienced by forcibly displaced persons. While states have long resisted taking in refugees that they perceive to be racially undesirable, they often make exceptions for those deemed more desirable. Case-specific evidence suggests that states respond to the former by enacting restrictive policies and to the latter by creating new pathways for temporary and permanent immigration. However, no systematic tests exist of this proposition. I pair a regression discontinuity analysis of two population-based surveys with a time-series cross-sectional analysis of the relationship between large refugee inflows and migration policy changes from 1968 to 2013, finding support for my argument. Exposure to non-white refugees leads states to enact more restrictive policies and triggers public support for those restrictions. Exposure to white refugees produces the opposite result. These findings corroborate a growing literature on racial inequality in international politics.

Andrew S. Rosenberg, "Institutions and Incentives to Emigrate: Why Fears of a Brain Drain are Overstated." 

Abstract: Does emigration cause a brain drain? The conventional wisdom suggests that emigration decreases human capital, particularly in poor states. However, others find that emigration produces a brain gain because migration prospects incentivize investment in education. This debate is at an impasse because extant work neglects the role of political regimes. To this end, I use individual-level and cross-sectional data to test the role that sending-state political conditions play in the brain drain/gain. I find that liberal democratic institutions moderate the effect of skilled emigration on human capital accumulation. On the one hand, autocratic institutions make emigrating more attractive. Under these conditions, citizens seek out education because high skilled migrants are more likely to get visas to move abroad. On the other hand, these incentives are not present in states that are committed to the rule of law, participatory democracy, and that protect the freedom of religion. This study mollifies concerns about the brain drain because it shows that the most vulnerable countries stand to gain the most from more open borders. It also highlights how emigration opportunities create incentives for individuals to acquire more education that lead to greater individual well-being, which destabilizes the state-centric frame of the brain drain.

Rosenberg, Andrew S. and Nazli Avdan. “Walled In: Border Barriers and the Diffusion of Terrorism.”

Abstract: In recent years, growing intellectual energy has been spent on why states build walls, with more recent attention paid to the effectiveness of walls in thwarting violence. Terrorist organizations operate across bases in multiple proximate states and are thus able to skirt state surveillance and monitoring by funneling their operatives and resources across borders, planning and executing cross-border attacks, and targeting porous borders. Our paper takes heed of the networked aspect of terrorist groups in order to investigate the effects of fences on the international diffusion of terrorism. We propose that fences may degrade groups’ ability to move transnationally by hurting the ability of groups to move easily across bases and choking off the flows of resources and operatives across contiguous territory. Using a network approach, we identify all states that are linked through shared borders. We find that while barriers impose some reductive effects on the spread of violence, the effects are heterogeneous across group-years. All told, we mirror existing work in casting doubt on the utility of fences in preventing the diffusion of terrorism across borders.

Rosenberg, Andrew S. and Hannah M. Alarian. “National Pride and Prejudice: How National Identity Moderates Anti-Immigrant Attitudes.”

Abstract: Anti-immigrant prejudice persists throughout the world. Many scholars assert that this prejudice is higher among those who strongly identify with their nation. We complicate this conventional theory, asking whether national identity can be activated to reduce xenophobia. Specifically, we investigate whether connecting immigration with an institution closely tied to national identity can reduce anti-immigrant sentiment among strong national identifiers. Using evidence from two survey experiments of United Kingdom citizens, we show that priming immigration within the National Health Service reduces support for anti-immigrant policies and anti-immigrant sentiment. Importantly, this effect is larger for the strongest national identifiers and persists regardless of whether immigrants are framed as high- or low-skill workers. Further this relationship is unique to the NHS as opposed to private healthcare markets. These results have significant implications for the value of highlighting the importance of immigration as a means to mollify anti-immigrant prejudice in the Global North.

Rosenberg, Andrew S. “Immigration Does Not Lower Social Capital.”

Abstract: For decades, many scholars and policymakers have presumed that immigration diminishes social capital by eroding social solidarity and weakening community ties, particularly when immigrants come from culturally different backgrounds. Such concerns have led to calls for limiting immigration despite the economic arguments that highlight the contribution of immigrants to economic development and other outcomes. However, extant work that implicates a negative relationship between immigration and social capital tends to either make this claim by fiat or use a limited selection of case studies. In this project, I use county-level and survey data from the United States, as well as a novel instrumental variable design, to examine this relationship. The findings challenge the prevailing assumptions about immigration’s negative effect on social capital. I find that immigration bolsters social capital, rather than diminishes it, which calls into question existing social fears that immigrants will cause society’s social ties to fray. This study offers important insights for policymakers and scholars interested in the political, social, and economic consequences of immigration.

Andrew S. Rosenberg, William Minozzi, Elias Assaf, and Christopher Gelpi, "Man, the State, and War: An Experimental Approach."

Abstract: Both scholars and interested observers of international politics share the intuitive sense that “leaders matter” in determining the onset and prevention of war. Much of the international relations literature on this question, however, has struggled to identify systematic causal effects. The difficulty in identifying the causal impact of leaders on the outbreak of war is primarily rooted in two issues: 1) the measurement of individual characteristics at a distance, and 2) the confounding of leadership characteristics with other national and international covariates in observational data. We propose a method for overcoming these problems through the online experimental analysis of crisis bargaining. We construct an online simulacrum for crisis bargaining that captures many of the key features of this literature while avoiding some of the important shortcomings of typical behavioral economics games for the study of war. Game instructions and screen shots of gameplay are included in our appendices. Next, we identify a key individual leadership characteristic - narcissism - and theorize its expected impact on play in our game. We then conduct computer simulations of game play based upon randomized assignment of narcissistic and non-narcissistic leaders to different simulated international systems. Our analysis of the simulated data illustrates the viability of our approach and provides hypotheses for the impact of leadership narcissism at the system level. At the same time, our results also highlight the importance of careful theorizing about causal process when examining treatment effects in a complex and strategic context.

William Minozzi, Andrew S. Rosenberg, Eun Bin Chung, and Matthew P. Hitt, "It Takes Two: Heterogeneous Motivations for Reputations in International Relations." 

Abstract: Most scholarship on reputations in IR argues either that states have instrumental motives, or that they cultivate reputations because of intrinsic reasons—or that the two accounts are observationally equivalent. Such equivalence suggests that motivational heterogeneity does not matter. In contrast, we claim that this equivalence results from a failure to identify a missing counterfactual: behavior in a system with limited capacity for reputations. We develop a theoretical minimal reputation environment to explain how actors with different motivations behave within various institutions, and test our predictions using an incentivized experiment based on trust games. Categorizing participants based on “folk realism,” we find that consequence-oriented realists respond dramatically to reputation enhancing institutions, leapfrogging appropriateness-oriented idealists in trust and trustworthiness. Moreover, a leader-follower dynamic emerges, as realists respond quickly to novel institutions and idealists adapt more slowly. Ultimately, we argue that it takes two kinds of motivations to explain reputations in IR.