Public Governance working group

2023-04-03 at 17:30h

Clément Gorin (University of Toronto)

The Emergence, Growth, and Stagnation of Cities: France 1760-2020

Abstract: This paper analyses the evolution of French urban areas from a historical perspective. Using building footprints extracted from collections of digitised historical maps covering mainland France in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, we define consistently urban areas and analyse their trajectories along the urban hierarchy. Our findings highlight increasing urbanisation with fewer and larger urban areas, consistent with agglomerations economies. Disaggregate analysis reveals significant heterogeneity, with the emergence, persistence, disappearance of urban areas.

2023-05-22 at 17:30h

Julian Dyer (University of Exeter Business School)

TBA

2023-06-19 at 17:30h

Milena Djourelova (University of Chicago)

TBA

2023-03-20 at 17:30h

Léo Picard (University of Basel)

Political Metaphors in U.S. Governor Speeches (with Dominik Stammbach)

Abstract: How do politicians use metaphors in their speeches? To provide evidence on this question, we apply a deep-learning-based metaphor detection model to a historical corpus of annual State of the State speeches given by U.S. governors, ranging from 1995 to 2022. Across 9 socio-economic topics, we present the following descriptive findings. First, metaphors are most commonly used on fiscal and economic issues. Second, Democratic governors employ more metaphors on environmental issues relative to Republican governors, who in turn express more metaphors on moral values. Third, we confirm that the language used to express political metaphors is emotionally charged, with a degree of heterogeneity. Our emotion scores increase the most in presence of a metaphor on subjects related to the economy, fiscal issues, and moral values.

2023-02-20 at 17:30h

Peiyuan Li (University of Colorado Boulder)

Who Lost (or Won) China? Land Reform and War Mobilization

2023-01-16 at 17:30h

Nikita Melnikov (Nova School of Business and Economics)

Mobile Internet and Political Polarization

2022-12-05 at 17:30h

Gloria Gennaro (UCL)

Immigration and Social Distance: Evidence from Newspapers during the Age of Mass Migration

Abstract: By Alessandra Stampi-Bombelli, Gloria Gennaro, Elliott Ash, Dominik Hangartner A constant of human history is the migration of peoples in search of a better future. In destination countries, these new arrivals come into contact with both the host population as well as already established immigrant communities. How does the arrival of new immigrants affect the perception of outgroup distance among the native majority group? And do new arrivals also change the perceived distance between the host population and existing immigrant groups? We address these questions in the context of the Age of Mass Migration (1860-1920), a period during which sizeable and diverse groups of migrants arrived on U.S. shores. Applying advanced computational linguistics techniques to a newly processed corpus of over 1.8 million newspaper issues (9 million pages) published by 3,675 local outlets in that period, we present a novel text-based measure of perceived socio-cultural distance between U.S.-born natives and 32 immigrant groups. For each mention of an immigrant group, we compute a distance measure that captures whether the group's framing more closely resembles contexts used when portraying immigrants, rather than natives. We use this time- and county-varying outcome to analyse the short- and medium-term effects of immigration inflows on local perceptions of socio-cultural distance toward the arriving and existing immigrant groups.