We analyze the assimilation patterns of Muslim immigrants in Western countries with a unique identification strategy. Survey and experimental data collected in France in 2009 suggest that Muslims and rooted French are locked in a suboptimal equilibrium whereby (i) rooted French exhibit...

Anti-Muslim prejudice is widespread in Western countries. Yet, Muslims are expected to constitute a growing share of the total population in these countries over the next decades. This paper predicts that this demographic trend, other factors held constant, will increase anti-Muslim prejudice....

Culture for Norton (2004) is a matrix of the sort popularized in the recent film, The Matrix. For all humans, who are products of culture, there is nothing outside of it. Politics is not merely reflected by culture, but is in culture. Culture also constitutes bodies as it constructs gender,...

This paper asks why and how institutions change. How does an institution persist in a changing environment and how do processes that it unleashes lead to its own demise? The paper shows that the game theoretic notion of self-enforcing equilibrium and the historical institutionalist focus on...

Based on observational studies, conventional wisdom suggests that citizenship carries economic benefits. We leverage a randomized experiment from New York where low-income registrants who wanted to become citizens entered a lottery to receive fee vouchers to naturalize. Voucher recipients were...