Economics Research Community Seminar – Dr Cevat Aksoy
Title: Corruption Exposure, Political Trust, and Immigrants
Date: 15 November 2023
Time: 13:00-14:00
Location: NUBS.2.05
If you would like to attend, please register using the following link:
Corruption Exposure, Political Trust, and Immigrants
Speaker: Dr Cevat Aksoy
Cevat Aksoy is an Associate Director, Senior Research Economist in the Office of the Chief Economist at European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London, Associate Professor of Economics at King’s College London, Department of Political Economy, a Research Associate at the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and IZA Institute of Labor Economics. He is also a co-founder of Global Survey of Working Arrangements (G-SWA), which is the largest cross-country survey to collect detailed information on workers’ experiences and attitudes regarding remote work arrangements. His research has been funded by King’s College London, the British Academy, and the World Bank. He mainly works on economic inclusion, forced migration, the political economy of trust and economic implications of working from home. His research has been covered by over 100 media outlets, including BBC, Bloomberg, Business Insider, Financial Times, Forbes, Fortune Magazine, Harvard Business Review, Mirror, Reuters, The Daily Mail, The Economist, The Independent, The New York Times, The Telegraph, The Times, Quartz, Vox, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and World Economic Forum. In 2017, he completed my PhD in Economics at University of London, Royal Holloway College. He was a visiting researcher at Stanford University, Economics Department in Fall, 2022. He received the Young Researcher Award from the Association of British Turkish Academics and was selected as a Leader of Tomorrow by The St. Gallen Foundation.
Abstract:
Using large-scale survey data covering 38 countries and exploiting origin-country variation across cohorts and surveys, we show that immigrants exposed to institutional corruption before migrating exhibit higher levels of political trust in their new country. Higher trust is observed for national political institutions only and does not carry over to other supra-national institutions and individuals. We report evidence that higher levels of political trust among immigrants persist, leading to greater electoral participation and political engagement in the long run. The impact of home-country corruption on political trust in the destination country is further amplified by large differences in income and democracy levels between the two countries. However, the effect is lessened by exposure to media providing independent information about institutional performance in the destination country. Finally, our extensive analyses indicate that self-selection into host countries based on trust is highly unlikely and the results also hold when focusing only on forced migrants who were unlikely to have been subject to selection.