Thiemo René Fetzer

Does Migration Cause Extreme Voting?

The 2004 accession of 8 Eastern European countries (plus Cyprus and Malta) to the European Union (EU) was overshadowed by feared mass migration of workers from Eastern Europe due to the EU’s rules on free mobility of labour. While many incumbent EU countries imposed temporary restrictions on labour mobility, the United Kingdom did not. Thiemo Fezter, together with Sascha Becker, have documented that following EU accession more than 1 million people (ca. 3% of the UK working age population) migrated from Eastern Europe to the UK. Places that received large numbers of migrants from Eastern Europe saw small, but statistically significant increases in the vote shares for the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in elections to the European Parliament. The researchers argue that these estimates are likely lower bounds of the effect of migration on overall anti-European sentiment. They show that the migration wave lowered wages at the bottom end of the wage distribution and contributed to increased pressure on public services and housing.

Mr Fetzer’s current research includes work quantifying the economic cost of terrorism, understanding the causal effect of political instability on economic development and studying the economic drivers of populism in the context of the UK and the EU as a whole.

Thiemo Fetzer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick. He is also affiliated with several other institutions including the Pearson Institute at University of Chicago, the Spatial Economics Research Group at London School of Economics and the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) at Warwick. He completed his PhD in Economics at the London School of Economics and held a visiting appointment at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. Mr Fetzer has worked as consultant for the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations.

Thiemo’s research interests lie in the fields of political economy & conflict, development and natural resources and his work has been published in journals, including the Economic Journal, the Journal of International Economics, the Journal of Development Economics and the Journal of the European Economics Association.