Calendrier du 23 septembre 2021
PEPES (Paris Empirical Political Economics) Working Group
Du 23/09/2021 de 12:30 à 14:00
Salle R2.01, Campus Jourdan
DURANTE Ruben (UPF)
The Impact of Online Competition on Local Newspapers: Evidence from the Introduction of Craigslist
écrit avec with Milena Djourelova, Gregory Martin
How does competition from online platforms affect the organization, performance, and editorial choices of newspapers? And what are the implications of these changes for the information voters are exposed to and for their political choices? We study these questions using the staggered introduction of Craigslist – the world’s largest online platform for classified advertising – across US counties between 1995 and 2009. This setting allows us to separate the effect of competition for classified advertising from other changes brought about by the Internet, and to compare newspapers that relied more or less heavily on classified ads ex ante. We find that, following the entry of Craigslist, local papers experienced a significant decline in the number of newsroom and management staff. Cuts in editorial staff disproportionately affected editors covering politics. These organizational changes led to a reduction in news coverage of politics and resulted in a decline in newspaper readership, which was not compensated by increased news consumption online or in other media. Finally, we document that this reduced exposure to political news coverage was associated with more party-line voting and increased ideological polarization in voters’ choices.
TOM (Théorie, Organisation et Marchés) Lunch Seminar
Du 23/09/2021 de 12:30 à 13:30
Salle R1-14 - Campus Jourdan 75014 PARIS
BLUMENTHAL Benjamin (ETH Zurich)
Is More Information Good for Voters?
Recent work in the political agency literature shows how being less informed about policy-making can improve voters' welfare. Using a model of targeted spending with homogeneously informed voters, I show how diverse papers analysing a large range of issues in policy-making -- the role of interest groups, the influence of media, fiscal transparency, the effect of non-binding law, the impact of ideology -- rely on the possibility of partial control, partial screening, or both, when voters benefit from less information. Building on this mechanism, I subsequently ask: if voters are heterogeneously informed, is it better to be part of a more informed elite or the less informed masses? How is the masses' welfare affected by the existence of a more informed elite? I show that the answers depend on the elite's ability to transmit verifiable information and the nature of its additional information.
Du 23/09/2021 de 11:00 à 12:00
MERLINO Luca Paolo (ECARES, Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management, Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium)
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Behavior seminar
Du 23/09/2021 de 11:00 à 12:00
SEMINAIRE ANNULE
MERLINO Luca Paolo (ECARES, Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management, Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium)
SEMINAIRE ANNULE - Homophily and Polarization in Endogenous Networks
In our model, players contribute to two local public goods for which they have different tastes and sponsor costly links to free ride on others’ contributions. We characterize the Nash equilibria of the game. In these equilibria, either there are two large contributors who might free ride on each other, or several contributors whose neighborhood of free riders does not overlap. As linking costs increase, agents seek connections to others, whose type is closer to their own, i.e., society becomes more homophilous. Polarization increases if links are intrinsically cheap and decreases otherwise. Moreover, if moderate agents emerge as large contributors, welfare increases, while polarization decreases in societies with low extremism.