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

Is Your Faculty All Male Because of Tenure Requirements?
Experimental Evidence From Economics Job Market Candidates

with Maria Cubel and Christina Sarah Hauser
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.

Loss of capital status: does it matter for a city’s development?

Extended abstract
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

Abortion ban and health outcomes of women and infants

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.

Presented at:
Health Econonomics of Risky Health Behavior workshop, University of Bologna

An evaluation of integration policies for Ukrainian refugee children in Poland

with Agnieszka Kozakoszczak, Urszula Markowska-Manista, Mikołaj Pawlak, Zuzanna Samson and Alessandro Tarozzi
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused an enormous inflow of refugees into Poland, including many children. About 350,000 Ukrainian school-aged children entered Polish schools, but integration is challenging, both because of the traumatic transition, difficult historical experiences, and because Polish and Ukrainian are related, but distinct, Slavic languages. Also, older students sometimes only attend online courses offered in Ukraine. To help children with schoolwork and integration, schools can hire “cross-cultural assistants” (CCAs). CCAs have to know Polish but are not required to have a degree in pedagogy, although most used to be teachers in Ukraine before the war. However, currently, there are approximately 140 refugee pupils per CCA. Such low numbers are problematic both for children’s learning and social integration, and because they leave many Ukrainian refugee teachers outside of the school system. Recently, the Polish government has decided to increase the number of CCAs (the objective is to have 1 CCA per 20 Ukrainian pupils), which until now were often funded irregularly by donors. This policy change, planned to be implemented as early as January 2025, offers an opportunity to study how CCAs can improve the integration of Ukrainian refugee children into Polish schools, through a collaboration between EUI researchers with researchers and stakeholders in Poland. Furthermore, the project aims to broadly study the case of a large-scale influx of refugees from Ukraine into Poland, in order to gauge how the learning and social integration of refugee children is affected by the presence of support teachers who are themselves refugees from the same country.