Research

Abstract: 

This paper examines how affirmative action quotas affect beliefs and behaviors in teamwork. While quotas increase diversity, they also create uncertainty about the role of merit versus demographics in selection. As a result, success conveys less information about candidates' relative abilities within a team when there is a quota. Yet, little is known about how such uncertainty influences participants' confidence and team dynamics. I conducted an experiment, comprising a tournament followed by a teamwork stage, and introducing a gender quota. I do not obtain a negative effect of quota on team performance. This is due to the negative selection effect of the quota and to successful women contributing relatively less than men. However, once controlling for any composition effects, successful teams reached a score 2 points higher when there is a quota. Finally, quotas generate gaps in the sending and interpretation of confidence signals between men and women, which create potential for persistent long-term biases. These findings suggest that combining signals of individual competence with quotas might help mitigate unintended consequences.

Abstract:

The transfer of power through elections is a cornerstone of democracy. We examine the effect of elections on a key health measure, excess mortality. We argue that electoral turnovers can create frictions that delay policy implementation and thus harm health, especially in times of crisis. Our data come from France, where local elections were held at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. Combining a conditional-on-observables strategy and a regression discontinuity design to analyze 5,000 electoral decisions, we find strong evidence supporting our theoretical argument. Municipalities where the incumbent mayor was defeated by an opposition candidate experienced 7-9 percentage points higher excess mortality, implemented fewer mask-wearing mandates, and issued significantly fewer emergency orders than municipalities with no turnover. Difference-in-differences analyses on a panel of 101 countries and territories suggest that these findings generalize to other contexts. While crucial to the functioning of democracy, holding elections during emergencies comes at a cost. 

Abstract: 

Trust is an important economic variable that may however be subject to measurement error, leading to econometric issues such as attenuation bias or spurious correlations. We use a test/retest protocol to assess idiosyncratic noise in the two main tasks that are used to elicit trust, namely survey questions and experimental games. We find that trust measures based on the trust game entail substantial measurement error (with up to 15\% of noise), while there is virtually no noise in stated trust measures. Given the specificity of our subject pool (students in a top Engineering school) and the short period of time between the test and the retest, we consider these percentages of noise as lower bounds. We also provide a sub-group analysis based on measures of cognitive ability and effort. We find substantial heterogeneity across sub-groups in trust-game behavior, but none for the survey questions. We finally discuss which measure of trust should be used, and the estimation strategies that can be applied to limit the effect of measurement error.

Abstract: 

How do voters react to an ongoing natural threat? Do voters sanction or reward incumbents even when incumbents cannot be held accountable because an unforeseeable natural disaster is unfolding? We address this question by investigating voters’ reactions to the early spread of COVID-19 in the 2020 French municipal elections. Using a novel, fine-grained measure of the circulation of the virus based on excess-mortality data, we find that support for incumbents increased in areas that were particularly hard hit by the virus. Incumbents from both left and right gained votes in areas more strongly affected by COVID-19. We provide suggestive evidence for two mechanisms that can explain our findings: an emotional channel related to feelings of fear and anxiety, and a prospective-voting channel, related to the ability of incumbents to act more swiftly against the diffusion of the virus than challengers.

Abstract: 

When committee members care about their reputation with a principal, making their choices transparent affects the outcome. In Parliaments, legislators care about their reputation with several principals, namely their constituents and Party leaders. It is thus unclear in which direction votes will move when they become observable, and moreover legislators may prefer to opt out of voting entirely in order to avoid conflict. This paper first uses French voting data to show that reputational concerns drive the decision to participate in a vote: in order to avoid blame legislators are less likely to vote when there is disagreement between the constituents and the Party. Second, making legislators' votes public increases their incentive to use voting for reputation-building, and, therefore, the distortion in group decision-making. The French transparency reform of 2014 provides a quasi-natural setting for a Difference-in-Differences analysis. Greater transparency led to less participation, as legislators preferred not to take sides.