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Working Papers
Sorting Fact from Fiction When Reasoning is Motivated. With Melis Kartal, Sylvia Kritzinger, and Jean-Robert Tyran
Abstract: What drives individuals’ ability to discern fact from fiction in complex and highly politicized issues? We combine theory and a multi-country survey-experiment to investigate how sorting fact from fiction and updating from news are influenced by cognitive ability, motivated reasoning, and overconfidence in complex topics such as climate change and science. We predict and find that cognitive ability (i.e., both IQ and education) improves news discernment. We also highlight the importance of motivated reasoning in both news discernment and updating from new information. Importantly, we still find the positive effect of cognitive ability to be robust and immune to motivated reasoning. These novel results are good news, suggesting that investments in critical thinking skills could help individuals discern fact from fiction even on complex and polarising issues.
Conditionally accepted at AEJ: Economic Policy
Conditionally accepted at AEJ: Economic Policy
Abstract: What happens when a country's electorate is suddenly increased by hundreds of thousands of new potential voters? How do parties adjust their strategies in response to such an event? To address these questions I exploit a quasi-experiment represented by the arrival in France of about 1 million repatriates from Algeria happened in1962. To study the causal impact of the repatriates on political outcomes, I instrument their location choice based on the average temperature by department. I first study how the repatriates’ arrival caused changes in the electoral strategy of French parties. Far-right parties immediately exploited the new issues introduced by the repatriates, the other parties were then forced to follow the same strategy. I also observe that the larger the arrival of repatriates in an area, the larger and more positive the description of the repatriates’ issues in electoral manifestos. I also show that the arrival of the repatriates increased turnout and the vote share of far-right parties while it decreased the vote share of centre-right parties in both legislative and presidential elections in the same period. These findings shed light on how a sudden and unexpected electoral shock can influence electoral strategy and how radical parties can affect mainstream ones by pushing new issues into their agenda.
Media Coverage: EHS The Long Run, Broadstreet Blog, AYEW
Abstract: On 1 May 2004, ten Eastern European countries joined the European Union and one million Eastern European citizens migrated to the United Kingdom. In the same years, an increase in Eurosceptic attitudes has been documented in the UK. This study, using a shift-shareinstrumental variable strategy, causally assesses the impact of the Eastern European migration shock on British citizens’ attitudes towards the EU. The results indicate that migration from Eastern Europe contributed to increased Euroscepticism. An immigrant-related crime threat is a likely driver of the observed increased Euroscepticism.
Did technology help emancipation? Evidence from Switzerland. With Cecilia García Peñalosa and Bjorn Brey
Abstract: Gender equality and economic growth have historically tended to move together yet identifying causal effects has been difficult. This paper uses data on the support for female suffrage in Switzerland in order to explore the impact of technology adoption on gender norms. We argue that the early adoption of electricity was conducive to local economic development, which in turn led to more egalitarian views on gender. To identify causality, we exploit geographic differences in the potential to generate electricity from waterpower. Our results show that early electricity adoption (by the 1910s) had a lasting impact on municipality vote shares in support of female suffrage in the ground-breaking 1959 referendum. We complement this finding with Cantonal referendums on female voting rights and federal electoral results to show that higher support for female political participation is observed in the data since the 1920s. We then examine how technology may have shaped gender attitudes and find that increased educational investment explains part of the shift. Fertility appears to respond to changing gender norms and reinforce them, but is unlikely the key mechanism in the causal chain.
Work in progress
Work in progress
The long-run effect of the Vendee War
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