Did the escalation of the crisis of 2008 affect the perception of immigration-related threats? A natural experiment

This paper applies a natural experiment approach comparing observations of the European Value Survey data prior and after the escalation of the financial crisis in 2008 in order to disentangle the short-term effect of the crisis on the relationship between social vulnerability and threat perceptions for the residents of Luxembourg (both Luxembourgers as well as foreign-nationals). Propensity score matching is used to ensure the balanced composition of the control and treated group with respect to the observed covariates. The results show that vulnerable foreign-nationals in Luxembourg demonstrated lower perceptions of job-related threats after the escalation of the financial crisis than their pre-crisis counterparts. Among Luxembourg nationals, no significant effect of the escalation of the crisis was found.