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Territorial conquest often provokes resistance, yet we lack direct evidence of how individuals navigate the institutional changes after annexation to a foreign country. Drawing on Hirschman's trilemma, I argue that conquered individuals can choose between emigration, assimilation, and mobilization. Which response individuals take depends on their linguistic resources and on the relative costs and opportunities of leaving, adapting, or resisting. I study how intellectuals in Alsace-Lorraine responded to the German conquest of 1872 and the French one of 1918. Results from a difference-in-differences design and novel spatial data on historical book publications to trace intellectuals' behavior indicate that both conquests triggered large shifts toward the language and names of the conquering state. These shifts reflected not only the emigration of local authors but also systematic assimilation efforts. Moreover, conquest simultaneously spurred regionalist mobilization. Additional analyses show that these patterns were not driven by changes in market demand and extended beyond elite producers to the broader population. These findings illustrate individual adaptation strategies under foreign rule and how conquest reshapes social boundaries.

In many contexts, religious leaders mobilize support for allied politicians. These mobilization efforts are often part of informal agreements in which politicians promise material compensation once elected, but may later shirk on their commitments. Given this uncertainty, little is known about how and when politicians compensate the brokerage of religious leaders. We study the compensation choices of elected politicians in a weakly institutionalized setting where religious brokers mobilize voters for personally connected candidates. We argue that politicians reward religious leaders by distributing rewards that increase their status within the organization and the local community. We illustrate this argument by investigating exchanges between Catholic bishops and Christian Democratic politicians in postwar Italy. Difference-in-differences estimates indicate that elected politicians reward connected bishops with investments in church renovations, and that electoral incentives drive these effects. These findings illustrate the reciprocal incentives that underpin politician-clergy alliances in electoral democracies.

Difference-in-differences (DiD) designs are widely used to estimate causal effects of location-based treatments on individual outcomes. Yet when treatments trigger selective migration, observed changes in location-level outcomes conflate behavioral responses of stayers with compositional shifts caused by selective entry and exit. This paper develops a formal decomposition of DiD estimands in the presence of treatment-induced migration. Building on principal stratification, I show that the aggregate DiD estimand decomposes into a behavioral component and compositional terms driven by selective exits and entries. The within-unit DiD with individual fixed effects identifies the Survivor Average Treatment Effect (SATE) for stayers, but not the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) for the full pre-treatment population. I characterize the ATT-SATE gap and propose three strategies for applied researchers to quantify compositional effects. Extensions address migration across treatment and control areas, where contamination and depletion biases compound the compositional effect, and staggered treatment adoption, where migration bias accumulates with exposure time.

Does the partitioning of states along ethnic lines reduce conflict? While most existing theories argue that partition prevents conflict recurrence by separating the parties, others dispute these findings. Rather than being driven by a separation logic, we argue that partition pacifies by reducing ethno-political domination. But power sharing can also reduce domination and thus bring peace within fixed state borders. Adopting a spatial approach, we reconceptualize partition as decreased cohabitation in dyads of transnationally-defined ethnic groups. Difference-in-differences analyses based on a global dataset (1946-2017) reveal mixed evidence that partition *per se* reduces intergroup conflict. Whereas its incomplete application is more likely to increase this risk, analysis using an index of domination shows that partitions that produce low-domination outcomes are more peaceful than those that do not. Moreover, we find that power sharing can also exert a pacifying effect without the destabilizing geopolitical side effects of border change.

Ethnic and national identities are closely tied to the incentives set by states within their borders. However, little is known of how identities change when state borders move. Focusing on the introduction and removal of international borders between 1815 and 1938, this paper investigates how border change affected the ethnonational geography of Europe. We argue that in periods of nation-building, individuals subjected to a change in ruling state are incentivized to assimilate into the conquering state. Using highly disaggregated proxies of national identity and the spatial discontinuities in ruling state caused by the introduction and removal of borders, we show that ethnolinguistic identities converge when under the same state and diverge when exposed to different states' rule. Assimilation, migration, and nation-building policy drive these results. Our findings highlight how geopolitics contributed to the formation of nations along state borders.

Immigration remains a contentious issue worldwide, often sparking debates about cultural integration and social cohesion. This study investigates how anti-immigration policies influence the cultural assimilation of immigrant populations, focusing on the 2014 Swiss popular initiative "Against Mass Immigration." Approved by 50.3% of voters, the initiative symbolized public hostility toward immigration and imposed new employment restrictions on EU migrants. Using the full Swiss registry data, we analyze migrant responses in terms of residential patterns, marital decisions, fertility, and assimilation choices. Difference-in-differences estimates comparing temporary EU migrants to other immigrants unaffected by the policy allow us to isolate the economic effects from those of increased perceived discrimination. Results suggest that nativist immigration policies reduce internal migrant mobility, foster desegregation, and reduce fertility. Yet we find no evidence of either reduced or increased cultural assimilation efforts. Our findings contribute to debates on whether nativist policy fosters assimilation or reinforces ethnic identity, offering insights into the impact of negative economic incentives on immigrant integration.