How effective is public scrutiny when exposure to political information becomes elective? I model media technology as the cost a consumer bears for steering attention away from a platform's default mix. Cheaper steering withdraws news from entertainment-leaning voters and gives more to news-leaning ones. With an evenly mixed default these effects offset, so aggregate scrutiny falls only when voters on average prefer entertainment; a news-heavy default makes it fall even in a balanced electorate. The loss is largest when all voters share the same preference for entertainment. Unbundling benefits every voter privately yet can reduce welfare, since each internalizes only a small share of the fall in the public good.

We investigate the effect of tenure requirements on the supply of female candidates for academic positions in Economics. Economic research is known for having a “leaky pipeline”: Despite high early-stage academic achievements, only few women reach tenured positions. Within a hypothetical choice experiment, we aim to quantify the willingness of PhD candidates in economics to give up salary, low teaching loads, or prestigious positions for jobs with less stringent tenure requirements. We hypothesize that high publication requirements for tenure deter female economists from pursuing a career in academia. Our findings aim to inform policies to retain female talent in academia.

What happens when reproductive laws in a developed country become one of the most restrictive in the world? We study the impact of the 2021 quasi-total abortion ban in Poland, which prohibited terminations on the grounds of fetal anomaly, previously accounting for the vast majority of legal abortions. Using monthly administrative records from all Polish hospitals between 2017 and 2023, we document an immediate and near-complete collapse of legal abortions following the ruling. In an event-study framework that exploits regional variation in pre-ban access, we find no significant changes in the number of births or miscarriages; however, we detect increases in neonatal and infant mortality. Overall, our results do not reveal robust or lasting impacts on maternal or infant health outcomes, beyond the sharp reduction in abortion availability.