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Vortragende Person/Vortragende Personen:
Christina Felfe de Ormeño

Diese Veranstaltung ist Teil der Veranstaltungsreihe „In_equality Colloquium“.

Christina Felfe de Ormeño (University of Würzburg)

"On the Early-Life Origins of In-Group Favoritism: The Role of Polarization and Cultural Distance"

Cluster members will receive participation information in time for the event. Guests are very welcome and receive information about the talk and a Zoom-link after registering here.

Abstract:
We examine whether native adolescents’ in-group favoring behavior changes as the ethnic composition of their peer group changes. Building on Brock and Durlauf (2001) and Hotelling (1929), we develop a model which predicts (i) an inverse-U shaped amount of in-group out-group bias as a function of intergroup diversity (the size of the immigrant group), which (ii) disperses as (ii) cultural distance between the two groups decreases and/or (iii) intragroup diversity (cultural heterogeneity) of the immigrant group increases. Empirically, we leverage the random assignment of students to classrooms within schools to obtain variation in the ethnic composition of a native’s peer group. We combine this with an incentivized, large-scale lab-in-the field experiment which elicits in-group out-group bias using an investment game. Consistent with our theory, but in contrast to unadorned contact theory, we find empirical evidence for an inverse-U shape, with the maximum amount of bias occurring when the native and the immigrant groups are of roughly equal size. The bias is strongest when the immigrant group is culturally homogenous and distant to the native culture. We corroborate our findings with a survey-based measure of in-group out-group trust.

Christina Felfe de Ormeño
is a Full Professor and Head of the Chair of Economics  at the University of Würzburg in Germany. Her research interest lies in the fields of Labor, Education and Migration Economics. After finishing her PhD in Economics at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain in 2008, she worked as an Assistant Professor (non-tenure track) at the University of St. Gallen, in Switzerland. She is a Research Affiliate at CEPR and a Research Fellow at the CESIfo and the Institute of Advanced Studies, member of the Standing Committee of Population Economics and the Standing Committee of Education Economics. She currently hold an ERC Consolidator Grant (2021-2026). At the moment, she is a Senior Fellow at the Cluster.