A new article, "Mobility Hub or Hollow? Cross-border Travelling in the Mediterranean, 1995-2016" was just published in Global Networks. The paper, co-authored with Ettore Recchi (Sciences Po/EUI) and Federica Bicchi (LSE/EUI) is based on joint work in the Global Mobilities Project at the EUI's Migration Policy Centre. We show that moblity in the Mediterranean is distributed extremely unequally. Mobility is much higher and increasing more strongly along the northern than along the southern shore, thus creating a growing mobility divide (see figure on the left). South‐north and north‐south movements are even scarcer and stagnate or even decline over time. Mobility between France, Spain and Italy constitutes almost 57 percent of all mobility in the Mediterranean althouth these three countries account for little more than one percent of all country pairs in the region.

Community detection algorithms reconfirm that mobility predominantly takes place in disparate clusters around the Mediterranean, not across it. These findings imply that much like the Rio Grande in the U.S., the Mediterranean still constitutes a dividing obstacle to mobility in the 21st century. Multivariate regression models for network data suggest that geographical distance and, to a lesser extent, political visa regulations, explain the unequal mobility structure better than differences in economic well‐being.

The paper is open access and can be read in full here.

The article "A Trump Effect on the EU's Popularity? The U.S. Presidential Election as a Natural Experiment", co-authored with Lara Minkus and Jan Delhey, is now published online-first at Perspectives on Politics. In the paper, we treat Trump's unexpected victory as an external shock and use a Eurobarometer survey that was conducted in all EU-28 member states four days prior to (control group) and six days after the election (treatment group) as source material for a natural experiment. The analysis reveals that the election of Trump caused a significant increase in the EU’s popularity in Europe immediately after the election. This “Trump effect” is considerable in size, roughly equivalent to three years of education. Gains in popularity were particularly high among respondents who perceived their country as economically struggling and, surprisingly, among the political right, suggesting that Trump’s victory broadened and ideologically diversified the EU’s base of support.  We also show that no such effect occurred when Obama was re-elected as U.S. president in 2012.

The article can be freely accessed here. A blog post summarizing the main findings has been published at the London School of Economics's United States Politics and Policy blog.

On Monday, September 17, 2018, I started to work as a visiting scientist at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission in Ispra, Italy. Over the next weeks and months, I will collaborate with Michele Vespe and Lorenzo Gabrielli in an exciting transdisciplinary project on cross-border air traffic and human mobility. More information to follow.