Salvatore Disalvo
Doctoral researcher at the LISER
Salvatore works on the project ‘ESSAYS ON ECONOMIC HISTORY AND MIGRATION: A EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVE‘ under the supervision of Christina Gathman
My PhD project explores the crossroads of economic history and migration. It seeks to shed light on innovative questions, such as the impact of migration on people’s lives, their homes and host communities during the era of mass migration; the influence of political decisions on migrants’ aspirations and work outcomes; and the role of institutions in shaping people’s beliefs and ideologies.
A key advantage of studying the past is its static nature. In fact, past events are inalterable and their outcomes are irreversible and observable. Fortunately, thanks to the foresight of those before us, the researcher has a chance to access extensive documentation and acquire a privileged point of view on invaluable information to understand the causes behind the events. Among the others, in the context of my research I will be exploiting census data and migration registers of Luxembourg to retrieve the dynamics of migration flows in the second half of the 19th century.
My work will involve a careful search for relevant documents in both physical and online archives like the Luxembourgish censuses and the Prussian annuals of statistics, the digitalisation of these sources, and the employment of cutting-edge OLS-based and machine-learning methods to establish causal relationships.