This paper examines how legal inclusion shapes immigrant assimilation effort. I study the 1915 Dow v. United States ruling, which classified Arabs as white and thus eligible for naturalization. Using U.S. Census data, I show that Arab children born after 1915 received significantly less foreign-sounding names, with within-family estimates indicating effects comparable to decades of additional parental U.S. exposure. Difference-in-differences analyses relative to Poles and other immigrant groups corroborate these findings. I also provide evidence that, among first-generation immigrants, intermarriage with natives increased following the ruling, while residential integration lagged behind. Importantly, these cultural shifts translated into economic payoffs: post-Dow cohorts with less-foreign names earned about 37 percent higher hourly wages and were significantly less concentrated in immigrant-intensive manufacturing jobs. Finally, I assembled a new corpus of Arab-American newspapers (1890–1940) to study identity debates, offering the first systematic text-based evidence of how migrants internalized legal reclassification. Taken together, these findings show that access to naturalization encouraged and rewarded assimilation—an insight of enduring relevance as contemporary pathways to citizenship narrow worldwide.

Draft available upon request 

🏅 MinE Best Paper Award, European Economic Association Congress 

👩🏽‍🏫 Harvard PE/History Tea, ACES Summer School, Lewis Lab Student Workshop, Boston University Development Group, Harvard Econ History Workshop, ASREC, NBER Race and Stratification Working Group, Harvard Political Economy and Culture Workshop, European Economic Association'25, Economic History Association'25, Brown University Growth Lab Seminar

This paper investigates colorism, racial discrimination based on skin color, in men’s football. Firstly, using machine learning algorithms, we extract players’ skin tones from online headshots to examine their impact on fan-based ratings and valuations. We find evidence of a skin tone penalty, where darker-skinned players face lower fan-driven market values and ratings. Secondly, using algorithm-based ratings and employing a Difference-in-Discontinuities design with geolocated penalty kicks data, we show that lighter-skinned players enjoy a premium higher by 1.25 standard deviations than their darker-skinned peers, conditional on scoring a penalty. Additionally, we find evidence that non-native players with dark skin face a double penalty. Leveraging the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment, we highlight the role of fans’ stadium attendance in algorithm-based results. The findings underscore direct skin tone discrimination in football and highlight fans’ role in perpetuating algorithmic bias. Working Paper

Updated draft coming soon! 

🥈 Runner-up, Best Paper Award, MENA and Asia Political Methodology 

👩🏽‍🏫 PolMeth MENA (NYU AD, honorable mention), Class for Sports and Society course (NYU AD), Association for Mentoring and Inclusion in Economics (AMIE, 3rd Applied Econ Workshop), ASREC/IRES Graduate Student Workshop, Applied Economics Seminar (PSE), 16th PhD Workshop in Economics (Turin, CCA), Sport Economics Guest Lecture Series (University of Tubingen)

We study how the behavior of older peers influences university track choices in Sweden’s centralized, strategy-proof matching system. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the enrollment shares of older high school peers across eight selective university tracks, we document a discouragement effect: a one percentage point rise in older-peer enrollment reduces the probability of ranking the track as one's first choice by 0.15–0.87 percentage points (10–28 % of the mean). This effect is largest among applicants with low to average grades and from the gender in minority in the given track, while high-achievers---especially migrants in Medicine---are unaffected. Our findings reveal a track-specific rank effect of potentially lower self-confidence and heightened perceived competition, highlighting contexts interventions may be necessary to better align aspirations with ability.

Draft available upon request. 

🇸🇪 The analyses are conducted using registry data from Statistics Sweden, with ethics approval from the Swedish Ethical Review Authority.

👩🏽‍🏫Petit Séminaire Informel de la Paris School of Economics, Growth Lab (Harvard), Swedish Institute for Social Research Lunch Seminar, Stockholm University Demography Unit Colloquium, Stockholm University Economics Department Lunch Seminar.