Public Governance working group

2023-06-19 at 17:30h

Milena Djourelova (University of Chicago)

Experience, Narratives and Climate Change Beliefs

Abstract: We study the media discourse and public opinion on climate change in the aftermath of extreme weather events. In both cable news and local media, and for both national-interest and local events, we find that left-leaning media consistently increase their coverage of climate change in the aftermath of natural disasters, while conservative media do not, despite equal disaster-related coverage. We then link the experience of disasters to concerns about climate change and the environment expressed in large-scale electoral surveys. We find a polarizing effect: disaster experience increases environmental concerns among liberal respondents, but has the opposite effect on conservative respondents. Both effects are driven by areas where the ideology of the respondent is in the minority.

2023-05-22 at 17:30h

Julian Dyer (University of Exeter Business School)

Words as Data: Evidence on Cultural Convergence and Change

Abstract: In this presentation we discuss our work based on a global, sub-national data set on cross-societal transmission. We use data on how words sound, how they are spelled, and what they mean, to estimate the etymological roots of each word and identify loanwords, using machine learning techniques. Societies with more loanword exchange share more societal traits in common, reinforcing the idea that cross-societal linguistic transmission proxies more generally for the diffusion of traits between groups. We use this to show that improved gains from trade causes cultural convergence, but that economic leverage determines the direction of convergence within a pair of language groups. Finally, we introduce a purely language data-driven approach to exploit the relevant information encoded in language to estimate the geographic origins of a historical phenomenon. We apply the methodology by tracing the history of religious words back to their originating languages to estimate the geographic origin of religious spread for each of Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity within 500km of historical estimates.

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.

2023-03-06 at 17:30h

Michael Poyker (University of Nottingham)

Economic Consequences of the U.S. Convict Labor System

Abstract: I study the economic spillovers of convict labor on local labor markets and firms. Using newly collected panel data on U.S. prisons from 1886 to 1940, I calculate each county’s exposure to prisons. I exploit quasi-random variation in a county’s exposure to the capacities of pre-convict-labor prisons as an instrument. I find that competition from cheap prison-made goods led to higher unemployment and reduced wages (particularly for women) in counties that housed competing manufacturing industries. Affected industries innovated away from the competition and thus had higher patenting rates. I also document that technological changes in affected industries were capital-biased.

2023-02-06 at 17:30h

Miao Ben Zhang (University of Southern California)

The Cost of Regulatory Compliance in the United States (with Francesco Trebbi)

Abstract: We quantify firms' regulatory compliance costs from 2002 to 2014 in terms of their labor spending to adhere to government rules. Detailed establishment-level occupation data, in combination with occupation-specific task information, allow us to recover the share of an establishment's wage bill owing to employees engaged in regulatory compliance. Regulatory costs account on average for 1.34 to 3.33 percent of the total wage bill of a firm, totaling between $79 and $239 billion in 2014. We investigate the returns to scale in regulatory compliance and find an inverted-U shape, with the percentage regulatory spending peaking for a firm size of around 500 employees. Finally, we develop an instrumental variable methodology for decoupling the role of regulatory requirements from that of enforcement in driving firms' compliance costs.

2023-01-09 at 17:30h

Annalí Casanueva Artís (PSE)

Can chants in the street change politics’ tune? Evidence from the 15M movement in Spain

Abstract: What are the long term effects of protests? This paper studies how the level of attendance at simultaneous marches organized by the 15M (the Spanish Occupy movement) impacted electoral behavior and political attitudes in the following decade. Using regional variation in weather shocks as an instrumental variable for the level of attendance at simultaneous marches, I find that cities with higher attendance are more concerned about corruption and vote more for left wing and anti-corruption parties and less for far-right parties. Using novel data from Twitter, I document, for the first time, a higher uptake of social media platforms after an offline protest and a persistent difference in online activity in cities with higher attendance. Using survey data, I also show a higher and longer-lasting electoral effect for people that have a social media account. Overall, this paper shows that street protests can have long-lasting effects on political concerns and electoral choices, explained, in part, by the creation of a persistent online social network.

2022-10-17 at 17:30h

Christina J Schneider (UC San Diego)

Globalization and Promissory Representation

Abstract: Promissory representation holds that political parties make promises to voters during election campaigns and generally keep those promises after elections if they have the opportunity to do so. Specific campaign promises let voters know where parties stand on issues, and voters' assessments of governing parties' past records of pledge fulfill- ment is one way in which parties are held to account. Despite the centrality of promise keeping to representation, we know little about how it is affected by economic global- ization, which is one of the defining characteristics of the modern world. We argue that globalization reduces governing parties' ability to keep their campaign promises. Inter- national economic integration increases uncertainty about the feasibility of promises, imposes legal constraints in the form of international commitments that may impede promise keeping in unexpected ways, and empowers market actors that lobby govern- ments when promises threaten their interests. We test the empirical implications of our theory with a mixed-methods approach that combines a large-n quantitative com- parative analysis of pledge fulfillment with a typical case study to trace the underlying causal mechanisms of the theory. The findings indicate that international economic integration exerts a large negative effect on the likelihood of pledge fulfillment in a broad range of contexts and that the hypothesized mechanisms are clearly observable in the detailed case study. These findings have important implications for democratic representation in a globalized world.