Far-right protests and migration. Enzo Brox1 Tommy Krieger2 March 12, 2021 Abstract We study how far-right rallies affect migration flows. To address this question, we use administrative and survey data from Germany and exploit that the city of Dresden unexpectedly experienced large-scale right-wing demonstrations. Results from dyadic fixed effect regressions and Synthetic Control analyses suggest that these rallies significantly reduced in-migration, especially of young Germans and foreigners. We also observe that many of these people are highly skilled. For out- migration, we find only small effects. Finally, we use results from a representative survey to illustrate that the far-right protests decreased Dresden's reputation and that people perceived this city as less secure afterwards. Keywords: Demonstrations, far-right, location choices, migration, right-wing populism, protests, reputation, university students JEL No.: F22, I23, R23 1University of Konstanz, Chair of Public Economics, Universit¨atsstaße 10, 78457 Konstanz, Germany. Email:
[email protected] 2Center for European Economic Research (ZEW), Department of Public Finance, L7 1, 68161 Mannheim, Germany. Email:
[email protected] 1 Introduction During the last decade, virtually all advanced democracies experienced far- right demonstrations with several thousand participants (Mudde, 2019).1 In economics and political sciences, the question of why people support the far-right thus received great attention in the last years (see e.g. Dustmann et al., 2019, Fetzer, 2019, Steinmayr, 2020). By contrast, the consequences of the growing popularity of right-wing movements have so far hardly been studied. The purpose of this project is to fill this gap.