Seth H. Werfel

Immigration is a highly polarized issue in the United States, and negative attitudes toward immigrants are common. Yet, almost all Americans are descended from people who originated outside the country, a narrative often evoked by the media and taught in school curricula. Can this narrative increase inclusionary attitudes toward migrants? We draw from scholarship showing that perspective-taking decreases prejudice toward out-groups to investigate whether reminding Americans about their own immigration history increases support for immigrants and immigration. We propose that priming family experiences can indirectly stimulate perspective-taking and induce empathy toward the out-group, which we test with three separate survey experiments conducted over two years. Our findings show that priming family history generates small but consistent inclusionary effects. These effects occur even among partisan subgroups and Americans who approve of President Trump. We provide evidence that increased empathy for immigrants constitutes one mechanism driving these effects.

How does voting interact with civic engagement outside the electoral process? An online field experiment on more than 140,000 registered voters in San Francisco yielded two main results. Subjects who voted in the 2016 primary elections were nearly three times more likely to open a survey from a nonprofit organization than those who did not vote in the primary election. However, explicitly priming voter identity and gratitude made all subjects far less likely to engage in this form of civic participation.

The recent confrontation between China and the United States over currency policy illustrates a broader phenomenon: exchange-rate misalignments tend to spill over into trade policy. Although previous studies have shown that aggregate protectionist activity is positively related to the level of the real effective exchange rate, we explore this relationship at the industry level. Several industry-specific characteristics determine the protectionist response to exchange rate changes, including the degree of exchange-rate pass-through, the level of import penetration, and the share of imported intermediate inputs in total industry inputs. We find that the marginal effect of currency appreciation on the number of industry-level antidumping petitions is positive and significant only for industries with high pass-through. Therefore, exchange rates appear to induce demands for trade barriers only in industries where competitiveness is directly harmed by currency appreciation.