Citation

Discussion Paper Details

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Title: Exposure to ethnic minorities changes attitudes to them

Author(s): Sabine Albrecht, Elena Cettolin, Riccardo Ghidoni and Sigrid Suetens

Publication Date: August 2020

Keyword(s): attitudes to immigrants, discrimination, ethnic diversity, individual-level fixed-effects regressions, intergroup contact, lab-in-the-field experiment, prejudice and refugee crisis

Programme Area(s): International Trade and Regional Economics

Abstract: Does exposure to ethnic minorities change the majority's attitudes towards them? We investigate this question using novel panel data on attitudes from a general-population sample in the Netherlands matched to geographical data on refugees. We find that people who live in neighborhoods of refugees for a sufficiently long time acquire a more positive attitude. Instead, people living in municipalities hosting refugees, but not in their close neighborhood, develop a more negative attitude. The positive neighborhood effect is particularly strong for groups that are likely to have personal contact with refugees suggesting that contact with minorities can effectively reduce prejudice.

For full details and related downloads, please visit: https://cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=15237

Bibliographic Reference

Albrecht, S, Cettolin, E, Ghidoni, R and Suetens, S. 2020. 'Exposure to ethnic minorities changes attitudes to them'. London, Centre for Economic Policy Research. https://cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=15237