The Political Risks of Separating

(Local) News from Entertainment

Voters no longer rely on daily TV news broadcasts or newspapers to learn about political matters. In 2023, the average American devoted merely 37% of daily media consumption time to traditional media channels, a significant decline from 68% in 2011. This trend reflects a broader change in media markets: where traditional media once bundled news with entertainment—compelling viewers to consume both—digital technologies now enable more granular, independent consumption patterns. Consumers can now selectively subscribe to movie streaming services or specialized news platforms, rendering news and entertainment increasingly economic substitutes. In this paper I show how this decoupling of media consumption can affect political outcomes, focusing on the rent-seeking behavior of politicians. My results are especially relevant for relatively smaller constituencies (subnational: regional or municipal), where political journalism might be at larger risk of bankruptcy than at the national or international level.
Presented at:
Nottingham Interdisciplinary Centre for Economic and Political Research (NICEP) 2024 conference
IX Hurwicz Workshop on Mechanism Design Theory in Warsaw
UniCatt Political Economy Research Day in Milan

Do High-Stakes Exams Deter Women From Studying Further?

Lessons From Economics PhD Programs

with Christina Sarah Hauser
Preregistered #162862 on AsPredicted.org
[draft coming soon]
We constructed a survey targeted to master students at Economics departments in Italy in which we ask about the preferences towards a course assessment during a hypothetical Ph.D. program (the weight 100% put on exams or 50% on exams and 50% on research proposal). Among other outcomes, we estimate a “willingness-to-pay” in the foregone amount of scholarship for a given type of assessment.
Presented at:
Behavioral and Experimental Economics Network (BEEN) workshop, University of Turin

Consequences of the loss of capital status on municipal socio-economic outcomes

Exploiting the administrative reform in Poland in 1999, I aim to examine the impact of losing the status of a regional capital on a set of socio-economic outcomes. Using a novel dataset on circa 800 municiplities in Poland, I aim to build a synthetic diff-in-diff model to estimate the effects causally.
Presented at:
Political Economy reading group at Department of Economics at SciencesPo

Assessing the impact of abortion restrictions on women’s and infant’s health outcomes in Poland

with Monika Raulinajtys-Grzybek and Alessandro Tarozzi
Poland and fourteen U.S. states have restricted abortion in 2021 and 2022, making them the only high-income countries having passed regressive reproduction laws in recent years. In the case of Poland, the abortion law before the restriction had already been one of the strictest in Europe. The 2021 restriction furthermore banned abortions on embryo-pathological grounds, which in 2019 constituted 98% of legal abortions in Poland. Now abortion is only permitted in cases of rape, incest, or a threat to the mother’s health and life. How has this law affected the health outcomes of infants and women? We answer this question with hospital-level data in Poland. This study aims to contribute to the relatively scarce literature on the impact ofrestrictive abortion laws on the health outcomes of both infants and women in a high-income country.