Work in progress

Autocrats use popularity to legitimize their rule. Can this popularity be boosted by distributing cash transfers to the public? We address this question by leveraging a unique quasi-experimental setting in Russia in 2020, where the unanticipated onset of the COVID-19 pandemic triggered two policy shifts: i) the rescheduling of a national referendum aimed to legally allow President Putin's further reelections and ii) the introduction of unconditional cash transfers for families with children under 16 years. This setting enables a difference-in-difference approach in which we compare political support among respondents with children - hence treated with transfers - and a similar group of respondents without children (control) across time: before the initial referendum date, when transfers did not yet exist, and before the actual referendum date, when transfers were disbursed. Importantly, our data comes from public opinion polls by an independent pollster, which are often used by the political elites to parade the prevailing support for the regime. We find that receiving the cash transfers substantially increased Putin's approval and support for extending his presidential term limits. However, these effects dissipated within three months. Further robustness tests reject alternative explanations related to the pandemic. Our paper provides the first empirical evidence that autocrats can strategically “buy” popularity to legitimize their grip on power.

This paper probes the persuasive power of authoritarian propaganda on social media and compares it to a similar campaign by the opposition. We carried out a field experiment during the 2018 presidential elections in Russia by collecting voting intentions and then randomly advertising a pro- and anti-regime YouTube video during a telephone survey shortly before the elections. During a follow-up interview after the elections, we gathered data on actual voting decisions to measure the effect of our treatments. We find that state propaganda on social media was effective in persuading respondents who consumed exclusively offline news sources, but failed to engage respondents consuming online news and even decreased their propensity to vote for the incumbent, conditional on their dissatisfaction with the government's performance. The anti-regime video, on the other hand, consistently decreased voting for the incumbent among both groups of respondents. Our results refute a widespread belief about the potency of authoritarian propaganda by showing its inability to engage with individuals outside its traditional audience.

We analyze media repression in Putin’s Russia (2004–2019), a smart dictatorship that mimics democratic institutions, notably relatively free elections and a relatively free press. Drawing on a unique granular dataset on journalist harassment and the pre-determined, staggered timing of local elections, we find evidence of strong political cycles of media repression. This media repression ahead of elections leads to a more favorable tonality of the news coverage of incumbents. Free press and free elections are temporally decoupled, thus disallowing them to work as effective accountability mechanisms. This secures the dictator’s power while upholding an image of competence and democratic rule.

This paper investigates the effect of Venezuelan transit migration on crime rates in Colombia. We exploit the reopening of the VenezuelaColombia border in 2016, which has led to a surge in transit migration, and geospatial information about the distinct routes through which the migrants crossed Columbia. Employing a difference-in-differences approach and propensity score matching, we find that transit migration increased property crime rates in crossed municipalities, with both native Colombians and Venezuelan refugees seeing higher victimization rates. Violent crimes remained unaffected. This is the first study to document a link between transit migration and crime. 

This paper investigates the causal impact of direct cash transfers on health, well-being, and life satisfaction among adolescents in Russia during the pandemic years. We study an unanticipated introduction of a COVID-19 state support policy for families with children in the form of two one-off transfers (140$ each) for all children younger than 16 years on the date of the policy approval. Our quasi-experimental design takes advantage of the sharp age discontinuity allowing us to compare the health and well-being of adolescents marginally eligible and marginally ineligible for these cash transfers using the data from a Russian longitudinal survey. The panel structure of the survey data enables the difference-in-difference approach as we control for past values of the outcome variables in the pre-pandemic year. We find a significant positive effect of cash transfers on adolescents’ material well-being, life satisfaction, and self-assessed health in the first and second pandemic years. Placebo estimations and various robustness tests confirm the validity of our results.

We revisit the effect of gun laws on suicide rates in the US states in the past 30 years by departing from the correlational analysis inherent in the previous literature and, instead, leveraging an instrumental variable (IV) approach based on policy convergences between contiguous states. The empirical analysis relies on the estimated gun law stringency constructed as the number of gun laws per state-year. Our causal results show that the gun control stringency significantly reduces firearm suicide rates (both in correlational and IV estimations), corroborating previous findings; yet this decline does not translate into fewer overall suicides – contrary to what was previously found in correlational studies. This novel finding suggests that gun laws are not effective in curbing overall suicide rates.