We exploit the sharp escalation in community-based ICE enforcement following the January 2025 inauguration to estimate the causal effect of immigration enforcement on consumer spending. Using Synthetic Difference-in-Differences with cross-state variation in surge intensity as the identifying variation, we find that states experiencing the largest enforcement surges saw aggregate card spending decline by 1.7 percentage points relative to their SDiD counterfactual, an effect robust to covariate adjustment, alternative shock windows, and pre-tariff truncation. Null estimates for non-in-person spending rule out a broad regional demand shock, while null estimates for jail-based arrests (enforcement invisible to surrounding communities) isolate enforcement visibility as the operative mechanism. Sector-level estimates reveal two empirically distinct channels: in states with Democratic governors, aggregate spending fell by −4.1 pp (p < 0.01), driven by large declines in Accommodation and Food Services (−2.3 pp) and Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation (−7.3 pp), consistent with behavioral withdrawal from public commercial life in jurisdictions where community enforcement was most visible. In Trump-voting states, Home Improvement Centers and Transportation and Warehousing spending fell by −3.8 pp (p < 0.1) and −3.0 pp (p < 0.01) respectively, consistent with labor supply disruption among undocumented workers in construction and logistics. Our results indicate that the economic costs of enforcement extend well beyond the directly targeted population and depend critically on whether enforcement is visible to the surrounding community — not merely on its scale.

We study how tax planning is organized within households using administrative data from the SpanishWealth Tax. Exploiting individual-level information on asset holdings and tax liabilities, we document strong intra-household comovement across legally defined planning margins, indicating that tax planning is a family matter. The strength and form of this comovement vary systematically with the internal distribution of wealth within the household. Behavioral responses are initially symmetric across spouses, consistent with bilateral coordination. As intrahousehold wealth inequality increases, however, symmetric coordination weakens and gives way to increasingly asymmetric responses, particularly for flexible asset-based margins. This patern is consistent with a shift toward a more hierarchical organization of tax planning centered on a single household member who controls flexible, tax-advantaged assets. Additional descriptive evidence shows that the relationship between intra-household income inequality and wealth inequality departs systematically from a simple proportional benchmark, in ways consistent with non-trivial within-household organization of resources rather than mechanical ownership structures. Together, these findings highlight the importance of intra-household inequality for understanding the organization, enforcement, and incidence of wealth-tax planning.

This paper studies the long-run political consequences of forced displacement when refugees carry distinct political ideas. With the collapse of the Spanish Republic in 1939, 500,000 left-wing leaning refugees fled into France, where logistical constraints quasi-randomly determined refugee camp locations. Exploiting this setting, we identify the causal effect of refugee exposure on political behaviour. Exposed municipalities shift away from Socialist support toward the Communist Party and display greater resistance activity and left-wing associational life, consistent with the diffusion of political ideas. Drawing on new individual-level data, we show that refugees concentrated near camp sites over the long run, providing a demographic channel through which political effects persisted and resurfaced in local political participation patterns decades later.

This paper investigates the impact of the #MeToo movement in the workplace, drawing on French survey data on harassment behaviours and administrative data on worker flows. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that, following the #MeToo movement, women began leaving high-risk workplaces at a significantly higher rate. This increase is mainly driven by women who quit their jobs. Both men and women who exit highrisk plants subsequently adjust their job search strategies toward less tòxic workplaces.

We analyze the incentives of authoritarian regimes to segment access to censored content through technology. Citizens choose whether to pay to access censored online content at a cost fixed by the regime: the firewall. A low firewall segments access and generates more compliance than full censorship – a high firewall – ever could. Regime opponents self-select into consuming censored content, and comply conditional on positive independent reporting. Regime supporters exclusively consume state propaganda, which secures their compliance. This segment-and-rule strategy can be engineered by making local news outlets uninformative, or by affecting the intrinsic benefit from access.

One in two women in the U.S. report experiencing physical violence, sexual violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime, and gun access is a central channel through which abusers can harm and control partners. I study whether state reforms that restrict domestic abusers’ access to firearms reduce violence against women. Leveraging variation in law changes across time and states, I find significant declines in reported violence after changes in the law with spillovers beyond intimate-partner incidents. The pattern is consistent with changes in coercive control and deterrence mechanisms. The results indicate that carefully scoped firearm prohibitions can reduce violence against women and these findings are relevant to inform policy discussions on gun laws and women’s safety.