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International audience; How does mobile broadband internet affect approval of government? Using surveys of 840,537 individuals from 2,232 subnational regions in 116 countries in 2008-2017 from the Gallup World Poll and the global expansion of third generation (3G) mobile networks, we show that an increase in mobile broadband internet access reduces government approval. This effect is present only when the internet is not censored and is stronger when traditional media is censored. This effect is reversed in the few countries with the lowest corruption. 3G helps expose actual corruption in government: revelations of the Panama Papers and corruption incidents translate into higher perceptions of corruption in regions covered by 3G networks. The disillusionment of voters in governments had electoral implications: In Europe, the expansion of mobile broadband internet led to a decrease in the vote shares of incumbent parties and an increase in the vote shares of the antiestablishment populist opposition. The vote shares of the nonpopulist opposition were unaffected by the expansion of 3G networks.

We study the long-run effects of forced migration on investment in education. After World War II, millions of Poles were forcibly uprooted from the Kresy territories of eastern Poland and resettled (primarily) in the newly acquired Western Territories, from which the Germans were expelled. We combine historical censuses with newly collected survey data to show that, while there were no pre-WWII differences in educational attainment, Poles with a family history of forced migration are significantly more educated today than other Poles. These results are driven by a shift in preferences away from material possessions toward investment in human capital. (JEL I25, I26, J24, N34, R23)

International audience; How effective is fact checking in countervailing “alternative facts,” i.e., misleading statements by politicians? In a randomized online experiment during the 2017 French presidential election campaign, we subjected subgroups of 2480 French voters to alternative facts by the extreme-right candidate, Marine Le Pen, and/or corresponding facts about the European refugee crisis from official sources. We find that: (i) alternative facts are highly persuasive; (ii) fact checking improves factual knowledge of voters (iii) but it does not affect policy conclusions or support for the candidate; (iv) exposure to facts alone does not decrease support for the candidate, even though voters update their knowledge. We find evidence consistent with the view that at least part of the effect can be explained by raising salience of the immigration issue.

We document substantial increases in agricultural productivity, industrial output, and peasants' nutrition in Imperial Russia as a result of the abolition of serfdom in 1861. Before the emancipation, provinces where serfs constituted the majority of agricultural laborers lagged behind provinces that primarily relied on free labor. The emancipation led to a significant but partial catch up. Better incentives of peasants resulting from the cessation of ratchet effect were a likely mechanism behind a relatively fast positive effect of reform on agricultural productivity. The land reform, which instituted communal land tenure after the emancipation, diminished growth in productivity in repartition communes. (JEL J47, N13, N33, N43, N53, Q11)

We provide evidence of corruption in allocation of public procurement and assess its efficiency. Firms with procurement revenue increase tunneling around regional elections, whereas neither tunneling of firms without procurement revenue, nor legitimate business of firms with procurement exhibits a political cycle. Data are consistent with the corruption channel—cash is tunneled to politicians in exchange for procurement contracts—and inconsistent with alternative channels. Using the strength of correlation between procurement revenue and tunneling around elections as a proxy for local corruption, we reject the “efficient grease” hypothesis: in more corrupt localities, procurement contracts go to unproductive firms. (JEL D22, D72, H57, K42, P26, P31, P37)

How far can the media protect or undermine democratic institutions in unconsolidated democracies, and how persuasive can they be in ensuring public support for dictator's policies? We study this question in the context of Germany between 1929 and 1939. Using geographical and temporal variation in radio availability, we show that radio had a significant negative effect on the Nazi electoral support between 1929 and 1932, when political news were slanted against Nazi party. This effect was reversed in just 5 weeks following Hitler's appointment as chancellor and the transfer of control of the radio to the Nazis. Pro-Nazi radio propaganda caused higher vote for the Nazis in March 1933 election. After full consolidation of power, radio propaganda helped the Nazis to enroll new party members and encouraged denunciations of Jews and other open expressions of anti-Semitism. The effect of Nazi propaganda was not uniform. Depending on listeners' priors about the message, propaganda could be very effective or could backfire. Nazi radio was most effective in places where anti-Semitism was historically high and had a negative effect on the support for anti-Semitic policies in places with historically low anti-Semitism.

We investigate the long-term effects of the important presence of Jews in Eastern Europe before the Second World War and their disappearance during the Holocaust. The Pale of Settlement, the area which Jewish residents were confined to in the Russian Empire, is used as a source of exogenous variation in the size of the Jewish population before the Second World War. Based on election and survey data, we find that current residents of the Pale, compared to their counterparts outside the Pale, vote more for socialist anti-market parties, have lower support for market economy and democracy, are less engaged in entrepreneurship, but exhibit higher levels of trust. At the same time, the Pale has no lasting effects on average consumption, income, and education levels. Regression discontinuity at the Pale border helps identification. We show that the effect of the Pale is related to the former presence of Jews rather than the inflow of new migrant population into the formerly-Jewish areas. We suggest a possible mechanism and present evidence consistent with it: non-Jewish population, at the time when two groups lived together side-by-side, developed persistent anti-market culture and bonding trust, rooted in ethnic hatred towards Jews. We show that, consistent with the mechanism, current residents of towns closer to places of pogroms exhibit higher trust and anti-market attitudes even controlling for the historical share of Jews in the population and the Pale.

Studies of mass support for economic reform reveal a simple conclusion: Everyone hates privatization. Yet whether respondents hold this view due to a preference for state property or concerns about the legitimacy of privatization is unclear. We test these arguments using a 2006 survey of 28,000 individuals in 28 post-communist countries and find that a lack of human capital affects support for revising privatization primarily via a preference for state property over private property; whereas transition-related hardships influence support for revising privatization due to both a preference for state property and concerns about the legitimacy of privatization. These results suggest the value of analyses that not only link respondent traits with support for policy, but that also probe the motivations that underpin this support. They also indicate that opposition to privatization should not be equated with support for renationalization.

We test the premise of the theoretical literature that M-form political hierarchies are effective in creating yardstick competition between regional divisions only when those divisions have sufficiently diversified or similar industrial composition. The reason for this is that the competition among poorly diversified inter-related divisions creates incentives for regional leaders to pursue policies that inhibit industrial growth in neighboring regions in order to make their own region look better from the point of view of the center. We use a unique episode in Soviet history, when a traditional Soviet unitary-form (U-form) hierarchy was replaced by a multidivisional-form (M-form) organization, namely, Khrushchev's Sovnarkhoz reform. First, we demonstrate that during this reform regional leaders were subjected to relative performance evaluation, which created incentives to generate industrial growth. Second, we show that these career concerns resulted in higher growth in regions with sufficiently diversified and, therefore, self-contained economies, and lower growth in highly specialized regions.

We provide a new compilation of data on ethnic, linguistic, and religious composition at the subnational level for a large number of countries. Using these data, we measure segregation of groups within the country. To overcome the endogeneity problem that arises because of mobility and endogenous in ternal borders, we construct an instrument for segregation. We find that more ethnically and lin guistically segregated countries, i.e., those where groups live more spatially separately, have a lower quality of government; there is no relationship between religious segregation and governance. Trust is an important channel of influence; it is lower in more segregated countries. (.JEL HI 1, H77, J15, 017, Z12, Z13) Racial and religious conflicts are often associated with poor politicoeconomic performance, especially in developing countries. Economists have recently turned their attention to ethnolinguistic fractionalization as an explanation of differences in the pace of development, starting with an influential paper by William Easterly and Ross Levine (1997). Since then, many others have shown that fractionalization is negatively correlated with a host of policy outcomes and the quality of government.1 However, many ethnically diverse countries (the United States, for instance) are quite successful. What makes different countries more or less capable of handling

The optimal degree of decentralization depends on the importance of inter-state externalities of local policies. We show that inter-state externalities are determined by the spatial distribution of interest groups within the country. Interest groups who have multi-state scope internalize inter-state externalities to a larger extent than the lobbyists with interests within a single state. We use variation in the geographic boundaries of politically-powerful industrial interests to estimate the effect of inter-state externalities on firm performance. Using firm-level panel data from a peripheralized federation, Russia in 1996-2003, we show that, controlling for firm fixed effects, the performance of firms substantially improves with an increase in the number of neighboring regions under influence of multi-regional business groups compared to the number influenced by local business groups. Our findings have implications for the literatures on federalism and on international trade as trade restrictions are a common source of inter-state externalities.

We use data from the 2006 round of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) to describe perceptions of the Russian population about the transition process and the role of the state compared to that of free markets. We find that about one half of Russian population is disappointed with transition and a large majority is in favor of high state regulation and state provision of goods and services. High demand for government regulation and increased state intervention coexists with a low level of trust in government institutions and recognition of high and rising levels of corruption. The findings are consistent with the theory developed by Aghion et al. (2009). In an environment with poor social capital, private business imposes negative externalities on the society and society chooses to demand more state regulation and tolerate corruption in order to reduce these externalities. We also find that individual perceptions of social capital and corruption co-vary with the demand for regulation, as predicted by the theory.

Despite strong growth performance in transition economies in the last decade, residents of transition countries report abnormally low levels of life satisfaction. Using data from the World Values Survey and other sources, we study various explanations of this phenomenon. First, we document that the disparity in life satisfaction between residents of transition and nontransition countries is much larger among the elderly. Second, we find that deterioration in public goods provision, an increase in macroeconomic volatility, and a mismatch of human capital of residents educated before transition (which disproportionately affects the aged population) explain a great deal of the difference in life satisfaction between transition countries and other countries with similar income and other macroeconomic conditions. The rest of the gap is explained by the difference in the quality of the samples. As in other countries, life satisfaction in transition countries is strongly related to income; but, due to a higher nonresponse of high-income individuals in transition countries, the survey-data estimates of the recent increase in life satisfaction, driven by 10-year sustained economic growth in transition region, are biased downwards. The evidence suggests that if the region keeps growing, life satisfaction in transition countries will catch up with the “normal” level in the near future.

We study the nature of judicial bias in bankruptcy proceedings following the enactment of bankruptcy law in Russia in 1998. We find that regional political characteristics affected judicial decisions about the numbers and types of bankruptcy procedures initiated after the law took effect. In particular, controlling for indicators of firms' insolvency and the quality of the regional judiciary, reorganization procedures were significantly more frequent in regions with politically popular governors and governors who had hostile relations with the federal government. Poor judicial quality was also associated with higher incidence of reorganizations. In addition, the quality of the regional judiciary affected performance of firms in reorganization procedure: in regions with poor judicial quality firms in reorganization significantly underperformed firms not in bankruptcy; while the opposite was true in regions with high-quality judges. The effect of judicial quality on restructuring is particularly strong in regions with politically popular governors because the judicial bias in governor's favor is the highest in poor-quality courts when governors are popular. This evidence is consistent with previously reported anecdotes that suggested that politically strong regional governors used bankruptcy proceedings to protect firms from paying federal taxes., Nous étudions la nature du biais judiciaire dans les procédures de faillite suite à l'introduction en Russie de la loi de 1998 sur les faillites. Nous trouvons que les caractéristiques politiques du pouvoir régional affectaient les décisions judiciaires quant au nombre et aux types de procédure de faillite engagée après la mise en vigueur de la loi de 1998. Nos résultats soutiennent la thèse selon laquelle les gouverneurs politiquement puissants usaient de cette législation pour dé livrer les entreprises de leurs dettes d'impôts au pouvoir fédéral.

Can media affect religious behavior? We study the effect of a drastic change in media landscape on religious participation in Poland, a country, where vast majority of the population considers itself religious Catholics. Before 2015, news on mainstream public and private media outlets had a similar moderately-liberal slant. In 2015, a right-wing populist party Law and Justice (PiS) came to power and took control of the editorial policy of public media, introducing a substantial conservative pro-government and pro-Church bias in public-media broadcast. A private TV network, TVN, remained the main source of freely available independent-from-the-government news on Polish television. In a difference- in-differences setting, we exploit spatial variation in TVN signal, sufficiently good for reception in about two-thirds of the country, and the overtime change in the content of the major state-owned TV network, which has good reception almost everywhere. We document that, after PiS came to power, religious participation fell more in municipalities with access to TVN compared to municipalities receiving only state TV signal. Using a large-scale online randomization experiment, we examine the effects of exposure to different types of content available only via independent media. We show that exposing both the pedophilia within the Church and the mutual financial and political support between the Church and the ruling PiS party decreases trust in religious institutions, but the effect of exposing pedophilia scandals is stronger. The experiment's results persist for at least three weeks.

This thesis consists of three empirical research papers on the political economy of China. The first chapter studies how conflict within an autocratic elite affects media content, while the second chapter shows how media content can in turn influence public opinion. The third chapter analyses the motivation and behaviour of individuals as they rise up the autocratic hierarchy.Chapter 1 offers an explanation for why media censorship varies within an autocratic country. I study how Chinese newspapers report about officials caught during Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign, by collecting close to 40,000 articles in print and the corresponding social media posts and comments. I show that individuals are significantly more likely to search for and comment on news about corrupt officials from their own province. Yet, despite greater reader interest, local newspapers underreport corruption scandals involving high-level officials from their own province. Underreporting is greater when a newspaper does not rely on advertising revenue and a corrupt official is well connected. When newspapers do report on high-level corruption at home, they deemphasise these stories, by making them shorter, less negative and less likely to explicitly mention corruption. Similarly, city-level newspapers report less about corruption in their own city relative to other cities in the same province, but are more likely to report corruption within their provincial government than corresponding provincial newspapers. These results illustrate how intergovernmental conflict within an autocracy can lead to diverging media censorship strategies by different levels of government. I present suggestive evidence that this type of localised censorship can reduce the accountability of local governments.Chapter 2 investigates whether stereotypes in entertainment media promote negative sentiment against foreigners. Despite close economic ties, anti-Japanese sentiment is high in China. I assemble detailed information on Chinese TV broadcasts during 2012 and document that around 20 percent of all TV shows aired during prime time were historical TV dramas set during the Japanese occupation of China during World War II. To identify the causal effect of media on sentiment, I exploit high-frequency data and exogenous variation in the likelihood of viewing Sino-Japanese war dramas due to channel positions and substitution between similar programmes. I show that exposure to these TV shows lead to a significant increase in anti-Japanese protests and anti-Japanese hate speech on social media across China. These effects are driven by privately rather than state-produced TV shows.Chapter 3, co-authored with Paul Dutronc-Postel, illustrates how career incentives can affect bureaucrats' policy choices. We collect data on the career histories of the top bureaucrats of all Chinese prefectures between 1996 and 2014 and identify the causal effect of career incentives by exploiting variation in the ex ante competitiveness of promotions. Bureaucrats with a smaller starting cohort have a greater likelihood of promotion. This incentivises them to adopt a strategy that relies on real estate investment and rural land expropriation, resulting in faster growth in construction and GDP. We present suggestive evidence that the same incentives result in lower investment in education, public transport and health. We corroborate our findings using survey and remote sensing data, and show that land expropriations are associated with adverse outcomes for expropriated individuals, with subsequent arrests of local officials, and with the emergence of "ghost cities".; Cette thèse se compose de trois articles de recherche empirique sur l'économie politique de la Chine. Le premier chapitre explique pourquoi la censure des médias varie au sein d'un pays autocratique. J'étudie la façon dont les journaux chinois rendent compte des fonctionnaires arrêtés lors de la campagne anti-corruption de Xi Jinping, en rassemblant près de 40,000 articles imprimés et les publications et commentaires correspondants dans les médias sociaux. Je montre que des individus sont plus enclins à rechercher et à commenter sur des fonctionnaires corrompus de leur propre province. Pourtant, malgré un plus grand intérêt des lecteurs, les journaux locaux sous-rapportent les scandales de corruption impliquant des hauts fonctionnaires de leur propre province. Lorsque les journaux rapportent sur la corruption dans leur propre province, ils minimisent ces scandales, en les rendant plus courtes, moins négatives et moins susceptibles de mentionner explicitement la corruption. De même, les journaux municipaux rapportent moins sur la corruption dans leur propre ville que dans d'autres villes de la même province, mais sont plus susceptibles de signaler la corruption au sein de leur gouvernement provincial. Ces résultats illustrent comment les conflits intergouvernementaux peuvent conduire à des stratégies de censure des médias divergentes par différents niveaux de gouvernement. Ce type de censure localisée peut réduire la responsabilité et imputabilité des gouvernements locaux.Le deuxième chapitre examine si les stéréotypes dans les médias de divertissement provoquent un sentiment négatif à l'égard des étrangers. Malgré des liens économiques étroits, le sentiment anti-japonais est élevé en Chine. Je rassemble des informations détaillées sur les émissions de télévision chinoises en 2012 et je documente qu'environ 20 pour cent de toutes les émissions diffusées aux heures de grande écoute étaient des dramatiques historiques qui se sont déroulées pendant l'occupation japonaise de la Chine. Pour identifier l'effet causal des médias, j'exploite les données à haute fréquence et la variation exogène de la probabilité de regarder des series de guerre sino-japonaises en raison des positions des chaînes et de la substitution entre des programmes similaires. Je montre que l'exposition à ces émissions de télévision conduit à une augmentation significative des manifestations antijaponaises et des discours de haine anti-japonais sur les médias sociaux en Chine. Ces effets sont attribuables à des émissions télévisées produites par des entreprises privées plutôt qu'à des émissions produites par l'État.Le troisième chapitre, co-écrit avec Paul Dutronc-Postel, illustre comment les incitations peuvent affecter les choix politiques des bureaucrates. Nous collectons les historiques de carrière des fonctionnaires de toutes les préfectures chinoises entre 1996 et 2014 et nous identifions l'effet causal des incitations en exploitant la variation ex ante du nombre de concurrents. Les cadres avec une cohorte initiale plus petite ont une plus grande probabilité de promotion. Cela les pousse à adopter une stratégie qui repose sur l'investissement immobilier et l'expropriation des terres rurales, et ce qui se traduit par une croissance plus rapide de la construction et du PIB. Nous présentons des preuves suggestives que les mêmes incitations entraînent une baisse des investissements dans des biens publics. Nous montrons que les expropriations de terres sont associées à des résultats négatifs pour les personnes expropriées, à des arrestations ultérieures de fonctionnaires locaux et à l'émergence de villes fantômes.

This thesis consists of three empirical research papers on the political economy of China. The first chapter studies how conflict within an autocratic elite affects media content, while the second chapter shows how media content can in turn influence public opinion. The third chapter analyses the motivation and behaviour of individuals as they rise up the autocratic hierarchy.Chapter 1 offers an explanation for why media censorship varies within an autocratic country. I study how Chinese newspapers report about officials caught during Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign, by collecting close to 40,000 articles in print and the corresponding social media posts and comments. I show that individuals are significantly more likely to search for and comment on news about corrupt officials from their own province. Yet, despite greater reader interest, local newspapers underreport corruption scandals involving high-level officials from their own province. Underreporting is greater when a newspaper does not rely on advertising revenue and a corrupt official is well connected. When newspapers do report on high-level corruption at home, they deemphasise these stories, by making them shorter, less negative and less likely to explicitly mention corruption. Similarly, city-level newspapers report less about corruption in their own city relative to other cities in the same province, but are more likely to report corruption within their provincial government than corresponding provincial newspapers. These results illustrate how intergovernmental conflict within an autocracy can lead to diverging media censorship strategies by different levels of government. I present suggestive evidence that this type of localised censorship can reduce the accountability of local governments.Chapter 2 investigates whether stereotypes in entertainment media promote negative sentiment against foreigners. Despite close economic ties, anti-Japanese sentiment is high in China. I assemble detailed information on Chinese TV broadcasts during 2012 and document that around 20 percent of all TV shows aired during prime time were historical TV dramas set during the Japanese occupation of China during World War II. To identify the causal effect of media on sentiment, I exploit high-frequency data and exogenous variation in the likelihood of viewing Sino-Japanese war dramas due to channel positions and substitution between similar programmes. I show that exposure to these TV shows lead to a significant increase in anti-Japanese protests and anti-Japanese hate speech on social media across China. These effects are driven by privately rather than state-produced TV shows.Chapter 3, co-authored with Paul Dutronc-Postel, illustrates how career incentives can affect bureaucrats' policy choices. We collect data on the career histories of the top bureaucrats of all Chinese prefectures between 1996 and 2014 and identify the causal effect of career incentives by exploiting variation in the ex ante competitiveness of promotions. Bureaucrats with a smaller starting cohort have a greater likelihood of promotion. This incentivises them to adopt a strategy that relies on real estate investment and rural land expropriation, resulting in faster growth in construction and GDP. We present suggestive evidence that the same incentives result in lower investment in education, public transport and health. We corroborate our findings using survey and remote sensing data, and show that land expropriations are associated with adverse outcomes for expropriated individuals, with subsequent arrests of local officials, and with the emergence of "ghost cities".; Cette thèse se compose de trois articles de recherche empirique sur l'économie politique de la Chine. Le premier chapitre explique pourquoi la censure des médias varie au sein d'un pays autocratique. J'étudie la façon dont les journaux chinois rendent compte des fonctionnaires arrêtés lors de la campagne anti-corruption de Xi Jinping, en rassemblant près de 40,000 articles imprimés et les publications et commentaires correspondants dans les médias sociaux. Je montre que des individus sont plus enclins à rechercher et à commenter sur des fonctionnaires corrompus de leur propre province. Pourtant, malgré un plus grand intérêt des lecteurs, les journaux locaux sous-rapportent les scandales de corruption impliquant des hauts fonctionnaires de leur propre province. Lorsque les journaux rapportent sur la corruption dans leur propre province, ils minimisent ces scandales, en les rendant plus courtes, moins négatives et moins susceptibles de mentionner explicitement la corruption. De même, les journaux municipaux rapportent moins sur la corruption dans leur propre ville que dans d'autres villes de la même province, mais sont plus susceptibles de signaler la corruption au sein de leur gouvernement provincial. Ces résultats illustrent comment les conflits intergouvernementaux peuvent conduire à des stratégies de censure des médias divergentes par différents niveaux de gouvernement. Ce type de censure localisée peut réduire la responsabilité et imputabilité des gouvernements locaux.Le deuxième chapitre examine si les stéréotypes dans les médias de divertissement provoquent un sentiment négatif à l'égard des étrangers. Malgré des liens économiques étroits, le sentiment anti-japonais est élevé en Chine. Je rassemble des informations détaillées sur les émissions de télévision chinoises en 2012 et je documente qu'environ 20 pour cent de toutes les émissions diffusées aux heures de grande écoute étaient des dramatiques historiques qui se sont déroulées pendant l'occupation japonaise de la Chine. Pour identifier l'effet causal des médias, j'exploite les données à haute fréquence et la variation exogène de la probabilité de regarder des series de guerre sino-japonaises en raison des positions des chaînes et de la substitution entre des programmes similaires. Je montre que l'exposition à ces émissions de télévision conduit à une augmentation significative des manifestations antijaponaises et des discours de haine anti-japonais sur les médias sociaux en Chine. Ces effets sont attribuables à des émissions télévisées produites par des entreprises privées plutôt qu'à des émissions produites par l'État.Le troisième chapitre, co-écrit avec Paul Dutronc-Postel, illustre comment les incitations peuvent affecter les choix politiques des bureaucrates. Nous collectons les historiques de carrière des fonctionnaires de toutes les préfectures chinoises entre 1996 et 2014 et nous identifions l'effet causal des incitations en exploitant la variation ex ante du nombre de concurrents. Les cadres avec une cohorte initiale plus petite ont une plus grande probabilité de promotion. Cela les pousse à adopter une stratégie qui repose sur l'investissement immobilier et l'expropriation des terres rurales, et ce qui se traduit par une croissance plus rapide de la construction et du PIB. Nous présentons des preuves suggestives que les mêmes incitations entraînent une baisse des investissements dans des biens publics. Nous montrons que les expropriations de terres sont associées à des résultats négatifs pour les personnes expropriées, à des arrestations ultérieures de fonctionnaires locaux et à l'émergence de villes fantômes.

Public consultations, especially online, are more and more commonplace in contemporary democracies. This work aims to study how interpersonal trust determines participation in public consultations, and the forms there of. I use the Grand Débat National, that occurred in France in 2019, as a natural experiment to study the geographic cross sectional relation ship between a novel synthetic measure of local interpersonal trust and various aspects of participation in this public consultation. Then I study evidence from a small-scale experiment on interpersonal trust and participation in an online public consultation. I conclude that high-trust individuals participate more to public consultations compared to low-trust individuals, both at the extensive and intensive margins, and that there exists a discrepancy in their forms of participation, in terms of content, but also when it comes to textual or lexical aspects of participation. This result calls for questioning the common presumption that public consultations will give a better representation to and help design be.er policies for everyone, particularly low-trust individuals. In fact, it appears that public consultations can be instead captured by the demands of high-trust individuals.