iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 15/04/2026

These results suggest that early & active employment support via public employment infrastructure can generate substantial & sustained gains in refugee labor market integration—but intensified counseling alone cannot address all barriers, particularly for refugee women from certain origin countries.

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 15/04/2026

One concern is that caseworkers prioritizing refugees could disadvantage other job seekers. Caseworkers might shift their effort toward refugees, while refugees themselves could potentially crowd out other job seekers. However, we find little evidence supporting this concern.

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 15/04/2026

For other refugee groups, gains concentrated among younger men. Effects for women were smaller and often not statistically significant—likely reflecting structural barriers such as childcare, slower language acquisition, and limited transferability of credentials in regulated professions.

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 15/04/2026

Effects are broad-based for Ukrainians—men & women, all skill levels, unemployment durations, regions and labor market conditions. The vast majority of exits were into regular, unsubsidized employment rather than temporary /mini-jobs. Importantly, the employment gains were not short-lived.

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 15/04/2026

Using administrative data and a DID, we find that among Ukrainian refugees, the monthly exit-to-job rate rose by 1.8pp—a 113% increase over baseline. That’s ~58,000 additional placements over 23 months. For refugees from Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq & others: +1pp (+28%), ~43,000 more placements!

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 15/04/2026

After 1M+ Ukrainian refugees arrived in Germany, the government launched the Job-Turbo (Oct 2023). At its heart: intensified counseling by caseworkers providing structured employment guidance, application support, and job referrals to ~400K unemployed refugees.

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 15/04/2026

🚨New Paper in PNAS: "Refugee Labor Market Integration at Scale: Evidence from Germany’s Fast-Track Employment Program" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Ungated preprint osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/px9ew_v3 w/ J Hainmueller, D Hangartner, @niklas-harder.bsky.social & E Vallizadeh #econtwitter #econsky

pnas.org

Refugee labor market integration at scale: Evidence from Germany’s fast-track employment program | PNAS

Governments face persistent challenges in integrating refugees into the local labor market, and many past interventions have shown limited impact. ...

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Jessica Hullman @jessicahullman.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

A few people have asked for the syllabus from my grad seminar on Generative AI for social science -- just posted it here: statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/03/10/n...

statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu

New course on generative AI for behavioral science | Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 27/02/2026

While there is much new, Paper Picnic 2.0 remains committed to simplicity: no alert chaos, no registration, no clutter. Curious about the details? Read more on the Paper Picnic Substack: substack.com/home/post/p-....

substack.com

Paper Picnic 2.0

In August 2024, I launched Paper Picnic, a weekly research digest with the latest published research articles from across political science and adjacent fields.

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 27/02/2026

The refurbished website gives you more control over what you see: toggle journal visibility and drag and drop to reorder journals. There is now also a dark mode 😎 and you can export BibTeX citations for new papers directly to your clipboard 📋(and from there to your reference manager).

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 27/02/2026

Working papers from SocArXiv (osf.io/preprints/so...) and OSF Preprints (osf.io/preprints) are now integrated directly into the main site. Make sure to submit your working papers in the category “Social and Behavioral Sciences” to appear on Paper Picnic.

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 27/02/2026

We now cover 142 journals — the top 20% of political science journals (N=70) and the top 5% of journals in adjacent fields. To rank journals, we used the Journal Citation Reports’ Article Influence Score.

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 27/02/2026

🧺 Paper Picnic 2.0 is here! More journals. New features. An easier way to keep up with the latest research in political science and adjacent fields. 🧵👇

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Paolo Crosetto @paolocrosetto.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

What is the most profitable industry in the world, this side of the law? Not oil, not IT, not pharma. It's *scientific publishing*. We call this the Drain of Scientific Publishing. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Background: doi.org/10.1162/qss_... Thread @markhanson.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy 👇

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 13/11/2025

Thank you! Bsky thread to the paper: bsky.app/profile/mori...

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 13/11/2025

We demonstrate that there is a compositional effect: using survey data, we show that leavers were 18 pp less likely to support the incumbent than stayers. Thus, in constituencies with more out-migration, the incumbent vote share increased.

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 13/11/2025

Using constituency-level electoral data, we show that in East German constituencies with more out-migration between 1990–1994, the incumbent vote share increased. What explains this? Do voters reward the incumbent for high out-migration (sparked by increasing unemployment)? Unlikely.

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 13/11/2025

To illustrate the formal results, we study the case of East Germany after reunification, when more than 9% of East Germans moved to former West Germany. How did this exodus affect electoral support for the incumbent coalition government in the 1994 federal election across East Germany?

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 13/11/2025

These two types of effects are conceptually similar but different to natural (in)direct effects in mediation analysis. We discuss how to identify, estimate, and bound the compositional effect from in- and out-migration.

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 13/11/2025

We use Rubin's potential outcomes framework to formally define compositional effects and to decompose the total causal effect of internal migration into exposure effects and compositional effects.

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 13/11/2025

When studying how internal migration affects changes in district-level electoral outcomes, it is important to separate the compositional effect (heterogeneity in political behavior between movers and stayers) from the exposure effect (change in political behavior due to exposure to migration).

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 13/11/2025

🚨New working paper: Compositional Effects, Internal Migration and Electoral Outcomes osf.io/preprints/so... #polisciresearch

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 24/10/2025

paper-picnic.com updated at 3:44 AM (github.com/sumtxt/picni...) and dispatched email but UCL mailman system seemed to have delayed outbound emails until 11 AM. No idea why. 🫠

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 10/09/2025

Short summary in the working paper bsky thread: bsky.app/profile/mori...

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 08/08/2025

I have been attending EPSA since 2014, but I’m excited to attend EPSS in Belfast next year instead. Below some clarification how EPSS differs from EPSA.

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EPSS @epssnet.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

The European Political Science Society is now accepting paper & panel proposals for its annual conference! 📢 Call for Papers: EPSS 2026 – Belfast  🗓️ June 18–20, 2026  📍 ICC Belfast  📬 Deadline: Nov 7, 2025 🧵

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EPSS @epssnet.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

🚨 Big News for European Political Science 🚨 We’re thrilled to announce the launch of the European Political Science Society (EPSS): a new, member-led, not-for-profit association built to support our scholarly community. 🔗 epssnet.org Here’s a thread with everything you need to know. 🧵

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 22/02/2025

Und wohin geht dann die Erststimme?

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 22/02/2025

Das Wählerverzeichnis ist in der Verantwortung des Kreiswahlleiters und nicht des Bundeswahlleiters. Es gibt also nicht 1 WZ in D. Wählen (persönlich und per Brief) kann man daher auch nur im jeweiligen Wahlkreis weil nur dort die Registrierung der Stimmenabgabe im WZ möglich ist.

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 21/02/2025

A few months actually. Launch date was August 23, 2024.

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 13/01/2025

6/ For policymakers preparing for future refugee arrivals, this research highlights the need to balance urgency, capacity, & effectiveness in integration programming. Scaling existing, proven programs may be more effective than building large-scale initiatives from scratch.

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 13/01/2025

5/ The limited number of classroom hours (320 vs. 600 hours), a non-standardized curriculum, and a lack of certification might explain the differences between the two programs.

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 13/01/2025

4/ But the pre-existing program did help refugees to secure jobs! Using a staggered difference-in-differences design, we find that participants were 4.4 percentage points more likely to be employed after just 1 year of starting the course, rising to 12 p.p. after 18 months.

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 13/01/2025

3/ Using a regression discontinuity design, we compare refugees who arrived in Germany before and after the eligibility cutoff for the ad hoc program, observing refugee employment outcomes over nearly 2 years. We find that the ad hoc program had no impact on employment.

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 13/01/2025

2/ We examine the effects of both programs on refugee employment.

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 13/01/2025

1/ Over 1 million refugees arrived in Germany in 2015. When established language training programs ("Integrationskurse") reached capacity, the Federal Employment Agency swiftly launched a new ad hoc program ("Einstiegskurse zur Deutschförderung") to enroll more.

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 13/01/2025

🚨New paper: Does ad hoc language training improve the economic integration of refugees? Evidence from Germany’s response to the Syrian refugee crisis 🚨 w/ Ehsan Vallizadeh, @niklas-harder.bsky.social, Dominik Hangartner, Jens Hainmueller doi.org/10.1093/jrss...

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Joe Noonan @joenoonan.se · 29/11/2024

This is such a great tool. Perfect way to start a Friday!

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 29/10/2024

To subscribe, write to polsci-paperpicnic-join@ucl.ac.uk. You will receive an automated email asking for confirmation (check spam folder). Once confirmed, you are subscribed. For details and troubleshooting: paper-picnic.com/notifications

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 29/10/2024

🚨 Picnic Notifications 📨: After much popular demand, you can now subscribe to weekly email notifications from paper-picnic.com. All new content from 30+ political science journals in 1 no-fluff email on Fridays.

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Political Science Research and Methods @psrm.bsky.social · 20/10/2024

📜Using a game-theoretic model, @moritzmarbach.bsky.social & C. M. Horz show that restrictive asylum policies also raise the credibility of applicants’ claims to political persecution and, therefore, may not decrease the number of admitted refugees www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #FirstView

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 30/08/2024

🚨New Tool: paper-picnic.com The latest published political science research (and research in adjacent fields) every Friday. No alert chaos, no registration, no clutter. Powered by @crossref.bsky.social

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 23/04/2024

5/ Additional analysis suggests that the integration boost does not come from refugees living in more welcoming places, but from substantial contact with and support by local hosts.

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Moritz Marbach @moritz-marbach.com · 23/04/2024

4/ Comparing refugees who were matched with similar refugees who registered but were not matched with a host due to host unavailability, we find that refugees who receive and accept the offer for accommodation are much better integrated.

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