Trial reportProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2026
The socioeconomic returns to citizenship: A randomized controlled trial.
Trial report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The economic returns to citizenship: Evidence from a meta-analysis.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Pooled it
- The socioeconomic returns to citizenship: A randomized controlled trial.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Trial
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Based on observational studies, conventional wisdom suggests that citizenship carries economic benefits. We leverage a randomized experiment from New York where low-income registrants with permanent residency who wanted to become citizens entered a lottery to receive fee vouchers to naturalize. Voucher recipients were about 36 p.p. more likely to naturalize. Yet, we find no discernible effects of access to citizenship on multiple economic outcomes, including income, credit scores, access to credit, financial distress, and employment. Leveraging a multidimensional immigrant integration index, we similarly find no measurable effects on noneconomic integration. However, we do find that citizenship reduces fears of deportation. Explaining divergence from past studies, our results also reveal evidence of positive selection into citizenship, suggesting that observational studies are susceptible to selection bias.
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Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.