The trade-off between admitting and paying. An experimental analysis of people's attitudes toward responsibility-sharing in refugee issues

The concentration of the world’s refugees in developing countries calls for international collaboration on the matter. In the face of concerns voiced amongst politicians but also the public, we investigate how people trade off the two most prominent responsibility-sharing mechanism. We conduct a survey experiment in 26 countries asking whether people would rather: a) admit more asylum-seekers, or b) provide financial assistance to host countries. We find that most respondents prefer admitting asylum-seekers overpaying. We also establish significant individual level heterogeneity that shed new light on people’s attitudes toward asylum-seekers. Importantly, we report that sociotropic concerns about broad economic and cultural implications for the nation strongly affect the willingness to admit rather than to pay.