Enzo Brox (University of Bern), who will present his paper “Far-right mass protests and their effects on internal migration,” co-authored with T. Krieger (ZEW).
Abstract: We examine how far-right mass protests shape cities’ reputation and thus location choices of nationals. To this end, we first exploit that the city of Dresden (Germany) unexpectedly experienced such protests at the turn of the year 2014/2015. Estimates from difference-in-differences and Synthetic Control analyses suggest that the number of (young) German adults who moved from another region to Dresden declined by around 10% due to the far-right mass protests. We complement our first analysis with a conjoint experiment where participants decide between two hypothetical cities. This experiment confirms that far-right rallies have a dissuasive effect and shows that left-wing people react stronger than right-wing people. It also reveals that far-right protests cause security concerns and concerns about finding like-minded people. The latter reaction is only observed for people that do not support the far right.
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