Research

[Working Papers]

Economic Identities and the Historical Roots of Climate Change Denial in the U.S.

What are the historical determinants of the high and persistent levels of climate change denial in the US?

Almost half of U.S. citizens doubt the reality of human-made climate change, a share that has remained stable over the last two decades. This paper argues that the roots of this denial are, in part, to be found in the economic histories of communities. Using data on 3.6 million oil and gas wells drilled between 1859 and 2022, I show that long-term exposure to fossil fuel extraction negatively impacts present levels of climate change beliefs — independent of present production and employment. These effects are neither driven by ideological bundling of beliefs, nor by selective migration. Instead, building on archival and, in particular, historical local newspapers data, I document the development of persistent fossil fuel identities in communities linked to their extraction, and show how they interacted with the formation of beliefs.

Small Campaign Donors (with Laurent Bouton, Julia Cagé & Vincent Pons) NBER Working Paper #30050
Who makes small political contributions and why?

We study the characteristics and behavior of small campaign donors and compare them to large donors. We build a dataset including all the 340 million individual contributions reported to the U.S. Federal Election Commission between 2005 and 2020. Thanks to the reporting requirements of online fundraising platforms first used by Democrats (ActBlue) and now Republicans (WinRed), we observe contribution-level information on the vast majority of small donations. We use these data to provide new evidence on four key dimensions of small donation behaviors. We first show that the number of small donors (donors who do not give more than $200 to any committee during a two-year electoral cycle) and their total contributions have been growing rapidly. Second, small donors include more women and more ethnic minorities than large donors, but their geographical distribution does not differ much. Third, using a saturated fixed effects model, we find that race closeness, candidate ideological extremeness, whether candidates and donors live in the same district or state, and whether they have the same ethnicity increase contributions, but significantly less for small donors. Finally, we show that campaign TV and social media ads affect the number and size of contributions to congressional candidates, particularly for small donors, indicating that pull factors are relevant to explain their behavior.

Science under Inquisition: The allocation of talent in early modern Europe appendix (with Francesco Drago, Roberto Galbiati & Giulio Zanella)

CEPR Discussion Paper #17644 [Submitted]

What are the consequences of tighter religious control on scientific production?

We study the Roman Inquisition’s (1542) impact on science during the Scientific Revolution (1500s-1600s). Biographical data on notable people reveal declining likelihood of scientists being active in states under the Inquisition’s jurisdiction starting in the 1540s. We build and estimate a structural dynamic model of occupational and location choices to explore causal channels and historical counterfactuals. Our results indicate that the main drivers of Italy’s scientific decline since mid-1500 are the Inquisition’s deterrence effect, which induced scientists to migrate and discouraged talented individuals from engaging in science, and the inter-generational training effect stemming from the consequent loss of science masters. Overall, the Inquisition depressed scientific scholarship in Italy by about 23% during the run-up to the Industrial Revolution. The net spillover on the rest of Europe is also negative, as the positive migration spillover on other European states is more than offset by the reduced stock of Italian scientists..

It Takes Money to Make MPs: Evidence from 160 years of British Campaign Spending appendix (with Julia Cagé)

CEPR Discussion Paper #34451 | | Revise & Resubmit at the Journal of Economic History

How did the relationship between money and votes evolve over time?

We study electoral campaigns over the long run, through the lens of their spending. In particular, we ask whether changing media technologies and electoral environments have impacted patterns of campaign spending, and their correlation with electoral results. To do so, we build a novel exhaustive dataset on general elections in the United Kingdom from 1857 to 2017, which includes information on campaign spending (itemized by expense categories), electoral outcomes and socio-demographic characteristics for 69,042 election-constituency-candidates. We start by providing new insights on the history of British political campaigns, documenting in particular the growing importance of advertising material (including via digital means), to the detriment of paid staff and electoral meetings. We then show that there is a strong positive correlation between expenditures and votes all over the time period we study, but the magnitude of this relationship has strongly increased since the 1880s, peaking in the last quarter of the 20th century. We link these transformations to changes in the conduct of campaigns, and to the introduction of new information technologies. We show in particular that the expansion of local radio and of broadband Internet increased the sensitivity of the electoral results to differences in campaign spending.

[Publications]

The Heterogeneous Price of a Vote: Evidence from Multiparty Systems, 1993-2017 (with Yasmine Bekkouche and Julia Cagé)

Journal of Public Economics, Volume 206, February 2022.

Is there a causal impact of campaign spending on votes in multiparty systems, and how does it vary across political parties?
Estimating these effects requires comprehensive data on spending across candidates, parties and elections, as well as identification strategies that handle the endogenous and strategic nature of campaign spending in multiparty systems. This paper provides novel contributions in both of these areas. We build a new dataset of all French legislative and UK general elections over the 1993-2017 period. We propose new empirical specifications, including a new instrument that relies on the fact that candidates are differentially affected by regulation on the source of funding on which they depend the most. We find that an increase in spending per voter consistently improves candidates’ vote share, both at British and French elections, and that the effect is heterogeneous depending on candidates’ party. In particular, spending by radical and extreme parties has much lower returns than spending by mainstream parties, and that this can be partly explained by the social stigma attached to extreme voting. Our findings help reconcile the conflicting results of the existing literature, and improve our understanding of why campaigns matter.

[Work in Progress]

100 Years of Political Selection in the U.K. (with Julia Cagé)

A novel database on the profiles of election candidates.

We have built a novel database on the descriptive characteristics of all the 30,590 candidates at the United Kingdom General Elections since 1918, and of the 13,022 election-constituencies in which they run, in order to investigate the dynamics of political selection and their relationship with electoral outcomes.

(Paper 1) The rising demand for representation. Do citizens care about representation? Building a "representation gap" index, we document the changes in patterns of representation and their impact on electoral participation. At the constituency level, we show that, since the early 2000s, turnout is lower the more candidates differ from their electorate in terms of education and occupation status - while the opposite was true over the XXth century. Similarly, we find that representativeness is now associated with an electoral advantage at the candidate level. These findings lead to a reassessment of the quality-representation trade-off; and of the reasons behind the persistence in the gap between political elites and those they represent.

(Paper 2) Parties as drivers of political selection. What are the role of parties in the long run trends in political representation?