Christopher Roth

Labour Market Concerns and Support for Immigration

Christopher Roth, together with Ingar Haaland, has examined whether labour market concerns causally affect people’s support for immigration. Using a large, representative sample of the US population, the researchers provided the respondents in the treatment group with research evidence showing no adverse labour market impacts of immigration. They determined that treated respondents update their beliefs about the labour market impact of immigration and become more supportive of immigration. Their results show that beliefs about the labour market impact of immigration are an important causal driver of people’s support for immigration.

In recent work, Christopher Roth has explored the factors that motivate people’s demand for news. His team has devised experiments to study how perceptions of media bias affect people’s demand for news. This design allows the team to study whether people read news primarily to “learn about the truth” or to “protect their beliefs”.

Mr Roth’s fields of specialisation are economics & psychology, subjective beliefs, applied microeconometrics, and political economy. He is especially interested in the role of subjective beliefs in shaping economic and political behaviour. His work has examined a variety of topics, such as attitudes towards immigration, beliefs about racial discrimination, experimenter demand effects, the formation of macroeconomic expectations and the determinants of political engagement. The key focus of his research agenda is concerned with the measurement and the experimental manipulation of beliefs applied to questions in labour economics, macroeconomics and political economy.

Christopher Roth is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute on Behavior and Inequality in Bonn and will join the University of Warwick as an Assistant Professor in September 2019. He holds a DPhil (PhD) an MPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford, a BSc in Psychology from the University of Hagen and a BSc in Economics from the University of Warwick. Recently he received the Reinhard Selten Award from the German Economic Association and the Young Economist Award at the European Economic Association European Meeting.