Articles
Does Anti-Immigrant Sentiment Decrease Support for Redistribution? Evidence from Two Online Experiments
2025, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, DOI: 10.1057/s41599-025-05549-6; with Alice Guerra
This study examines a relationship that has been implied by years of correlational research: that natives’ support for welfare redistribution declines when benefits are allocated to immigrants rather than natives—a phenomenon known as welfare chauvinism. We conducted two online experiments (N1 = 273, N2 = 1060) involving redistribution to unemployed
people through real donations to charity, framed as tax compliance decisions within a simulated reporting task. We employed a between-subject design, randomly assigning participants to treatments that differed solely in the immigration status of the charity-benefit recipients. Drawing from native samples in Italy, Denmark, and the UK, we find that natives’ support for redistribution is not statistically affected by the recipients’ immigration status. This null effect holds across both studies, despite spanning a four-year period (2000–2024) marked by major global events which might have been expected to shift preferences regarding welfare state distribution and immigration, including: the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ukrainian refugee crisis, and the increasingly anti-immigrant turn in Italian, Danish, and UK politics. Our findings challenge prevailing theories of welfare chauvinism and invite both replication efforts and reconsideration of long-standing theoretical givens.
Secrecy Strategies: Global Patterns in Elites’ Quest for Confidentiality in Offshore Finance
2025, PLOS One, doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0326228; with Herbert Chang & Daniel Rockmore.
This paper examines variations in how the ultra-rich use the offshore financial system, based on users’ country of origin. We find that political conditions in elites’ countries of origin shapes whether they simply diversify their assets across multiple OFCs, or take risky and reckless steps, like putting assets in blacklisted jurisdictions or holding their wealth in bearer bonds or shares–the blank checks of the offshore world. Among our surprisingly results, we find that elites from well-governed countries like Denmark and Austria use the offshore system in patterns similar to elites from autocratic and corrupt states, such as Iran and Vietnam. Overall, we find three key patterns of offshore use–diversification, identity concealment and combination strategies–each of which has implications for public policy, as well as for scholarly models of inequality, elites, and financial crime.
Complex Systems of Secrecy: The Offshore Networks of Oligarchs
2023, PNAS Nexus, doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad051; with Herbert Chang, Feng Fu & Daniel Rockmore.
Following the invasion of Ukraine, the US, UK, and EU governments–among others–sanctioned oligarchs close to Putin. This approach has come under scrutiny, as evidence has emerged of the oligarchs’ successful evasion of these punishments. To address this problem, we analyze the role of an overlooked but highly influential group: the secretive professional intermediaries who create and administer the oligarchs’ offshore financial empires. Drawing on the Offshore Leaks Database provided by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), we examine the ties linking offshore expert advisors (lawyers, accountants, and other wealth management professionals) to ultra-high-net-worth individuals from four countries: Russia, China, the United States, and Hong Kong. We find that resulting nation-level “oligarch networks” share a scale-free structure characterized by a heterogeneity of heavy-tailed degree distributions of wealth managers; however, network topologies diverge across clients from democratic versus autocratic regimes. While generally robust, scale-free networks are fragile when targeted by attacks on highly-connected nodes. Our “knock-out” experiments pinpoint this vulnerability to the small group of wealth managers themselves, suggesting that sanctioning these professional intermediaries may be more effective and efficient in disrupting dark finance flows than sanctions on their wealthy clients. This vulnerability is especially pronounced amongst Russian oligarchs, who concentrate their offshore business in a handful of boutique wealth management firms. The distinctive patterns we identify suggest a new approach to sanctions, focused on expert intermediaries to disrupt the finances and alliances of their wealthy clients. More generally, our research contributes to the larger body of work on complexity science and the structures of secrecy.
Professions and Inequality: Challenges, Controversies, and Opportunities
2022, Journal of Professions and Organization, 10 (1): 80-98; with Louise Ashley, Mehdi Boussebaa, Sam Friedman, Stefan Heusinkveld, Stefanie Gustafsson & Daniel Muzio.
This series of individual essays comprise a discussion forum examining how professions can both exacerbate existing inequalities and contribute to solving the problems of stratification.
Do Experienced Subjects Bias Experimental Results? Evidence from 16 Laboratories in Six Countries.
2022, Economic and Political Studies, 11 (3): 350 – 364; with Alice Guerra, Sven Steinmo & John D’Attoma.
This paper addresses an area of growing concern for laboratory researchers: are subjects’ behaviours affected by prior experiences in laboratory experiments? We address the question with a large and highly diverse international dataset, and an operationalization strategy that allows our findings to cohere with previous work while shedding new light for future research. The findings presented here are drawn from original data gathered as part of one of the largest tax compliance experiments ever conducted, involving more than 3,000 participants in six countries, across 16 different laboratories. Our results reveal that subjects’ behaviour correlates with their past experimental experiences, in a way that could bias results and compromise a study’s external validity; however, this change in behaviour due to experience occurs only after subjects have participated in at least two previous laboratory experiments. Our findings have implications not just for tax compliance
Regional Variation in Tax Compliance and the Role of Culture
2022, Economia Politica, 40: 139 – 152; with Alice Guerra.
This research note analyzes the role of culture on individuals’ tax compliance by focusing on regional differences within a single country: Italy. Southern Italy has long been a focus of research interest, not only for its high rates of tax evasion, but for a host of other social and political ills, all usually attributed to regional culture. Our laboratory tax compliance experiment, conducted in provinces of the northern and southern regions, reveals that taxpayers in the north and south generally behaved alike both in terms of average compliance rates and individuals’ sensitivity to changes in tax structures—except for lower responsiveness to greater redistribution of tax revenues among subjects in Salerno than those in Bologna. This suggests the limited explanatory power of culture in tax compliance in favor of institutional explanations.
Secrecy, Simmel & the New Sociology of Wealth
2021, Sociologica, 15 (2): 143 – 152.
What relevance does an early twentieth-century thinker like Simmel have for the contemporary sociology of wealth? This paper suggests that Simmel’s classic work on the secret and secret societies is embedded but largely unacknowledged in twenty-first century wealth research. Thus, the purpose of this discussion is to make these contributions more visible and sketch their implications for new directions in the field.
Why Do People Pay Taxes? Explaining Tax Compliance By Individuals
2021, Pp. 356-374 in Handbook on the Politics of Taxation, Lukas Hakelberg and Laura Seelkopf (Eds.), Edward Elgar; with Alice Guerra.
This chapter reviews the latest findings in experimental research on tax compliance, from 2018 onward. It identifies the main themes and points of agreement in this recent literature, as well as the questions that remain unanswered for future research to address.
Toward A Multilevel Sociology of Fraud
2021, Northwestern University Law Review, 118 (1): 139-166; with Camilo Arturo Leslie.
This essay applies a distinctively sociological multilevel analysis of fraud to provide novel insights and recommendations on an old problem. Rather than treating fraud as a problem of “criminogenic environments” or of individual psychologies and motivations, this multilevel analysis investigates the ways in which individuals (the micro level) interact with organizations (the meso level) and institutional systems (the macro level) to produce fraud. We illustrate these interactions and the insight that an interactive analysis can provide by using ethnographic data from an in-depth case study of the R. Allen Stanford offshore financial fraud. The case, which occurred in the Caribbean island nation of Antigua and Barbuda in the 1990s and early 2000s, is not just the story of a bad actor. It is one that illustrates the ways that regulatory agencies, legislatures, and the offshore system can facilitate—or impede—fraud at various levels of analysis. We conclude with the practical insights that can be derived from this multilevel perspective.
Transnational Professionals
2020, Annual Review of Sociology, 46: 399 – 417; with Leonard Seabrooke.
This review answers recent calls to consider the transformative role of transnational professionals in contemporary globalization. It departs from the dominant perspective, which views professions as constrained by states’ geographical boundaries and by organizations such as nationally based professional associations. Transnational professionals have particular characteristics: they combine high-level abstract knowledge, high mobility across national and organizational settings, social and cultural capital, and distributed agency to shape global practices. Over the past two decades, a vibrant research stream has emerged on these professionals and their boundary-crossing work, raising new questions about agency, territoriality, and power. We examine transnational professionals across a range of occupations and sectors, as well as world regions, extracting the implications for sociological theory and methods. We outline a scholarly agenda highlighting the opportunity structures and likely trajectories for those who locate themselves in transnational professional spaces, suggesting how they can be investigated in future research.
Turning Vice into Virtue: Institutional Work and Professional Misconduct
2019, Human Relations, 72 (9): 1464-1496.
Why do professionals engage in or aid misconduct, rather than rejecting it as a threat to their legitimacy and labor market survival? This paper contributes to the scholarly agenda by drawing on an ethnographic study of professionals who facilitate offshore tax avoidance for the ultra-wealthy. This form of expert advisory work has become highly controversial, and is increasingly classified as a form of professional wrongdoing. Building on theories of institutional work and categorization, the study theorizes practitioners’ responses to field-level legitimacy threats. Specifically, the paper models a process in which misconduct is re-categorized in terms of the core norms that underpin professional legitimacy. Through this process, practitioners create institutional change by altering the way they see themselves and their work, transforming the “vice” of tax avoidance into the professional “virtues” of public service and expert neutrality. This model advances knowledge compared to previous research on professional misconduct, which was situated primarily at the organization level, and responds to calls for analysis of “agentic self-categorization” processes in creating the micro-foundations for legitimacy in the professions.
Attitude–Behavior Consistency in Tax Compliance: A Cross-National Comparison
2018, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 156: 184-205; with Alice Guerra.
Are individuals’ attitudes about paying taxes consistent with their behavior? A direct link between attitudes (tax morale) and behavior (tax compliance) has long been assumed, despite an extensive social scientific literature attesting to the generally weak congruence between the two. This study builds on an emerging body of work questioning the link between tax morale and compliance. It innovates with a cross-national experimental research design whose results indicate that populations with high levels of tax morale exhibit higher evasion rates than those with low levels of tax morale; thus, the study finds that individual self-reported tax morale cannot predict actual evasion choices. Methodologically, the paper contributes the first results of a laboratory experiment on taxation in Denmark, comparing them to laboratory findings from Italy; while previous research indicates that these two countries lie at opposite extremes in tax compliance and morale, our findings run contrary to “culturalist” explanations. Our results show that Danes are more likely to evade tax than Italians, and that individuals’ attitudes toward tax do not significantly predict their actual evasion choices. Finally, we show that discrepancies in tax behavior between Italian and Danish subjects are affected by gender and risk aversion.