Suffering and prejudice: do negative emotions predict immigration concerns?
利用德国社会经济面板数据，研究发现负面情绪（如愤怒、恐惧、悲伤）的频率与移民担忧正相关，且这种关系因就业状态、出生队列和社交媒体使用而异；进一步通过父母去世的外生变化推断因果关系，发现负面情绪对女性移民担忧有正向影响，但对男性不显著。
Abstract This paper examines the role of individuals’ emotions in determining their concerns about international migration. For the empirical analysis, we exploit little-explored information in the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) data on individuals’ negative emotions, e.g., anger, fear, and sadness. We find that the frequency of experiencing negative emotions is positively associated with immigration concerns. Moreover, we show that the relationship varies across employment status, birth cohort, and social media usage. Our analysis also underscores the real-life consequence of emotions by demonstrating their positive association with support for far-right political parties among males, but not among females. Finally, we exploit the exogenous variation in negative emotions induced by the death of a parent to infer causality. Fixed effects regressions with instrumental variables exhibit a positive impact of negative emotions on immigration concerns among females, but no significant effects are found among males. Further investigation into channels driving these gender differences in results underscores gender differences in roles played by other concerns that often carry over to determine individuals’ immigration concerns, e.g., concerns about international terrorism.