Christian Ambrosius

My research interest is economic development and comparative economics, applied economics, migration, and finance with a special attention to the experiences of Latin American countries. Building on a background in both political science and economics, I am particularly interested in topcis at the intersection of both disciplines.

Currently I am leading two externally funded projects. The project "Immigration Enforcement across the World: Drivers and Consequences of Deportation Risk" (DEPRISK) is funded by Thyssen Foundation for three years (09/2022-09/2025). The project "The Long Shadow of Immigration Enforcement: Consequences of Forced Returns in Migrants´ Countries of Origin" (DEPCON) is funded by the German Research Foundation (1/2025 – 1/2027). The goal of the former is to assemble the first country-by-country data base on deportations from administrative sources in host countries in order to unpack aggregate patterns and mechanisms related to the political economy of deportation regimes in host countries as well as their consequences in migrants’ countries of origin. The latter aims to explore how forced returns affect families and communities at origin for the paradigmatic case of El Salvador. To this end, surveys shall be applied to households connected to a close relative who had to return as the result or in anticipation of a deportation order, compared to a carefully matched control group of transnational households unaffected by deportation shocks but with similar average pre-treatment conditions.