My research focuses on migration, integration, and social inequality. I study how individual resources, social contexts, and institutions shape migrants’ trajectories before and after migration, with a particular focus on refugees and other recent immigrants.
A major strand of my research concerns migrants’ structural integration. I examine labour-market entry and employment trajectories, job quality, gender inequalities, language acquisition, human-capital investments, health, and the role of social networks. A recurring question is how institutional arrangements — including asylum procedures, legal status, access to language courses and healthcare, residence regulations, and labour-market institutions — facilitate or constrain integration.
A second, increasingly important strand of my work examines migration decision-making across the migration trajectory. This includes forced-migration and displacement decisions, settlement intentions, return migration, onward migration, and immobility. I am particularly interested in how economic opportunities, legal and institutional conditions, family circumstances, social integration, and political developments in countries of origin and destination shape migrants’ mobility aspirations and actual behaviour.
Beyond economic and structural integration, I study broader dimensions of migrants’ incorporation into receiving societies. My work addresses identification and belonging, institutional and generalised trust, naturalisation intentions, family and household dynamics, religiosity, and the ways in which local attitudes and institutional contexts affect migrants’ opportunities and experiences.
Conceptually, my research combines sociological and economic approaches to migration, labour markets, and social stratification. I am particularly interested in the interaction between individual resources and institutional contexts, and in how inequalities emerge and develop over time.
Empirically, I work with large-scale longitudinal surveys, linked survey and administrative data, and international comparative data. My research employs longitudinal and comparative designs, natural and quasi-experiments, survey experiments, and conjoint experiments. I also contribute to the development of data infrastructures and methods for improving the quality of social-science data, including research on survey measurement, interviewer behaviour, and data linkage.
I use this expertise to provide evidence-based policy advice at the national and international levels, particularly on migration, refugee integration, labour markets, and migration and return policies.
My work has been published in peer-reviewed journals, edited volumes, and research and policy reports. I have also co-edited books, special issues, and collections in peer-reviewed journals.
I am a member of several professional associations and international research networks.
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