Research
WORKING PAPERS
The Dynamics of Multi-Project Collaborations (2024)(with Roi Orzach)[Download][Online Appendix ]
Collective experimentation often involves cooperation across multiple domains. We study a setting where two players with asymmetric preferences collaborate on several independent multi-armed bandit problems, each consisting of infinitely many ex-ante identical projects and representing a distinct domain. In each period, the players jointly decide whether to explore new projects or exploit known projects within each domain, using monetary transfers to better align their incentives. We characterize an experimentation policy that maximizes the players' joint surplus and show that it exhibits common features of collective experimentation, such as gradualism, excessive exploration, postponing project exploitation, exploiting projects temporarily, and returning to abandoned projects.
Organizing a Kingdom (2023) (with Simone Meraglia and Nico Voigtlaender) [Download]
We develop a framework that examines the organizational challenges faced by central rulers when delegating administrative authority over rural areas and towns to local elites. We highlight two key mechanisms that describe how shifts in the economy can lead to institutional change: First, as towns’ economic potential grows (e.g., due to the Commercial Revolution), their inefficient administration by outsiders (i.e., landed elites) leads to higher losses for the ruler. Thus, the ruler grants self-governance to towns, allowing urban elites to better adapt to local shocks (trade opportunities). Second, in order for self-governing towns to coordinate their choices with the ruler’s interests, they need to receive reliable information about shocks to the kingdom (e.g., war threats). To ensure effective communication, the ruler informs towns directly in central assemblies. Overall, this process increases the weight given to urban elites’ preferences in decisions made by all stakeholders. Our framework can explain the emergence of municipal autonomy and towns’ representation in parliaments throughout Western Europe in the early modern period. We also discuss how the model applies to other historical dynamics, and to alternative organizational settings.
Self-Reporting Schemes and Employee Wrongdoing (with Martijn Han), (2021) [Download] R&R, Journal of Industrial Economics
We study self-reporting schemes in the context of employee wrongdoing. We model the interaction between a regulator and a continuum of firms, where each firm has one employer and one employee. Within the scope of their employment, employees can take an action beneficial to themselves but harmful to their employer and society. Employers design employment contracts that either prevent the harmful act or tolerate it. We investigate whether corporate and individual sanctions should be reduced when employees confess to having committed the harmful act. In an extension, we let employers monitor their employees, and investigate whether corporate and individual sanctions should be reduced when employers disclose incriminating evidence. We use the resulting insights to discuss policy implications.
Knowledge Acquisition in a High-Stakes Environment: Evidence from the Covid-19 Pandemic (with Amit K. Khandelwal, Andrea Prat, and Ashley Swanson) [Download]
We measure Covid-19 knowledge at the onset of the pandemic. Information acquisition models predict that the precision of information increases in the benefits of improved decisionmaking and decreases in the costs of acquiring information. Indeed, we find that individuals with lower information costs are more informed, and that the benefits of information (proxied by mortality risk) predict information acquisition. High-risk individuals’ knowledge is initially lower, but converges, albeit slowly, to that of low-risk individuals within 43 days. These findings highlight the importance of information cost heterogeneity and suggest a role for policies that increase information access for high-cost, high-benefit groups.
Motivating Agents to Acquire Information (2017) [Download]
I investigate the optimal way of organizing and motivating the production of information by a team of agents. I compare two modes of production. In the "team outputs" setting, agents produce public information jointly and their individual contributions are indistinguishable. In the "individual outputs" setting, each agent produces her own public information. Directing agents to produce information jointly is commonly observed. Yet, agency theory stresses the difficulties associated with providing incentives based on team outputs and emphasizes the superiority of individual performance measures. This paper provides one reason why the joint production of information is common in practice, which does not rely on ad hoc technological advantages.
Job Scope and Motivation under Informal Incentives (2023) (Short Paper with Roi Orzach), draft
We model the relationship between the number of tasks assigned to an employee and a firm's ability to motivate effort through informal performance-based bonuses. We show that the assignment of multiple tasks gives the firm a greater range of performance levels that can be rewarded. The firm takes advantage of this by designing equally motivating, flatter, and hence more credible incentives.
PUBLICATIONS
Media Competition and News Diets (with Julia Cagé and Mike Sinkinson) (2023) [Download][Online Download], American Economic Journal: Microeconomics (2024) Media Coverage: The Hill, Vox
News media operate in two-sided markets offering bundles of content to readers and selling readers' attention to advertisers. Technological innovations in content delivery, such as the advent of broadcast television or of the Internet affect both sides of the market, threatening the basic economic model of local news operations. We examine how the entry of television affected local newspapers as well as consumer news diets in the United States. We develop a model of local media and show that entry of national television news could reduce the provision of local news. We construct a novel dataset of U.S. newspapers' economic performance and content choices from 1944 to 1964 and exploit quasi-random variation in the rollout of television to show that this new technology was a negative shock in both the readership and advertising markets for newspapers. Newspapers responded by providing less content, particularly local news. We tie this change in consumer news diets to a decrease in split-ticket voting in elections.
Is Journalistic Truth Dead? Measuring How Informed Voters Are about Political News (2023)(with Andrea Prat)[Download][Online Appendix], American Economic Review (2024) Media Coverage: Slow Boring, The Hill, econimate, AEA Research Highlights
How many voters are informed about political news mainstream journalists consider important? We develop a methodology that combines a protocol for identifying major news stories, online surveys, and the estimation of a model that disentangles individual information precision from news story salience and partisanship. We focus on news about US politics in a monthly sample of 1,000 voters repeated 8 times. On average, 85% of individuals are able to distinguish the major real news story of the month from fake news. 59% of individuals confidently believe this news story to be true, 39% are uncertain, and 3% confidently believe it to be false. Our results indicate that the starkest pattern about the ability of voters to identify major news stories is not the generalized death of truth or its ideological polarization but rather its unequal distribution along socioeconomic lines.
How Merchant Towns Shaped Parliaments: From the Norman Conquest of England to the Great Reform Act (with Simone Meraglia and Nico Voigtlaender) [Download] [Online Appendix], American Economic Review (2022) Media Coverage: AEA Research Highlights
After centuries of stagnation in the “Dark Ages,” the Commercial Revolution led to a boom in economic activity and urbanization across Western Europe. The surge in trade and commerce that began in the 11th century was followed by the emergence of self-governing merchant towns. Soon after, these merchant towns gained representation in regional and national parliaments. This paper establishes the mechanism by which trade led to parliamentary representation, via municipal autonomy. We focus on England after the Norman Conquest of 1066 and build a novel comprehensive dataset of 554 Medieval towns (boroughs), tracking their institutional development over eight centuries. We document a two-step process: First, inefficiencies in the king's centralized system of tax collection became increasingly distortive to trading towns. In a mutually beneficial solution, merchant towns paid higher annual taxes in exchange for Farm Grants – the right of self-governed tax collection, cutting out royal officials. Second, Farm Grants were stepping stones towards representation in the English Parliament: To raise extra-ordinary taxes (e.g., for wars) from self-governed towns, the king had to negotiate with them – and negotiations took place in Parliament. We also show that Medieval self-governance had important long-term consequences and interacted with nationwide institutional changes. Boroughs with Medieval Farm Grants continued to have broader voting rights in the 17th to 19th centuries, they raised troops to back Parliament against the king during the Civil War in 1642, and they supported the Great Reform Act of 1832 that extended the franchise.
Petty Corruption and Citizen Reports (with Antonio Russo). [Download] [Online Appendix], International Economic Review (2022)
Offering incentive schemes to low-ranking officials is difficult in corrupt environments. As is well known, there exists a tension between the dual goals of enforcing regulations and preventing corruption. Recent efforts to curb abuses have inspired interest in using new communication technologies to collect information directly from citizens. In our model, entrepreneurs must comply with regulations before undertaking a risky activity. Officials verify their compliance and may engage in corruption. The government tolerates corruption and weak enforcement when it does not communicate directly with entrepreneurs. We show that a simple self-reporting scheme in which entrepreneurs can report their own noncompliance to the government is optimal, and both deters corruption and improves regulatory enforcement.
Newspapers in Times of Low Advertising Revenues (with Julia Cagé), [Download], American Economic Journal: Microeconomics (2019) Media Coverage: Vox
Newspapers' advertising revenues have declined sharply in recent decades. We build a model to investigate the consequences on newspapers' content and prices of a reduction in advertisers' willingness to pay. Newspapers choose the size of their newsroom, and readers are heterogeneous in the relative amount of journalistic-intensive content they prefer. We show that a reduction in advertising revenues lowers newspapers' incentives to produce journalistic-intensive content, which affects the composition of their readership. We then build a unique dataset on French newspapers between 1960 and 1974 and perform a difference-in-differences analysis using a “quasi-natural experiment": the introduction of advertising on television, which affected national newspapers more severely than local ones. We find robust evidence of a decrease in both the amount of journalistic-intensive content produced and the subscription price, which may help rationalize current industry trends. We also provide evidence that national newspapers' readership became less educated and affluent following the change in prices and content.
IN PROGRESS
The Nationalization of American Lawmaking? Evidence from State Statutes (with Elliot Ash and Nicolas Longuet Marx), draft coming soon
Beliefs About Political News in the Run-up to an Election (with Michel Gutmann and Andrea Prat), draft coming soon