Template-Type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0 Author-Name: Emanuele Bracco Author-Name-First: Emanuele Author-Name-Last: Bracco Author-Name: Maria De Paola Author-Name-First: Maria Author-Name-Last: De Paola Author-Name: Colin Peter Green Author-Name-First: Colin Peter Author-Name-Last: Green Author-Name: Vincenzo Scoppa Author-Name-First: Vincenzo Author-Name-Last: Scoppa Title: The Effect of Far Right Parties on the Location Choice of Immigrants: Evidence from Lega Nord Mayors Abstract: Immigration has increasingly taken centre-stage in the political landscape. Part of this has been rise in far-right, anti-immigration parties in a range of countries. Existing evidence suggests that the presence of immigrants has a substantial effect on the political views of the electorate, generating an advantage to these parties with anti-immigration or nationalist platforms. This paper explores a closely related issue but overlooked issue: how immigrant behavior is influenced by these parties. We focus on immigrant location decisions in Northern Italy which has seen the rise of the anti-immigration party Lega Nord. We construct a dataset of mayoral elections in Italy for the years 2002-2014, and calculate the effect of electing a mayor belonging to, or supported by Lega Nord. To identify this relationship we focus on mayors who have been elected with narrow margins of victory in a Regression Discontinuity framework. The election of Lega Nord mayor discourages immigrants from moving into the municipality. Creation-Date: 2017 File-URL: http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/media/lancaster-university/content-assets/documents/lums/economics/working-papers/LancasterWP2017_007.pdf File-Format: application/pdf Number: 156985061 Classification-JEL: J15, J61, D72 Keywords: Immigration, Geographical Mobility, Voting Behavior, Political economy, Regression Discontinuity Design Handle: RePEc:lan:wpaper:156985061