Calendrier du 24 septembre 2024
PSI-PSE (Petit Séminaire Informel de la Paris School of Economics) Seminar
Du 24/09/2024 de 17:30 à 18:30
R1-09
Virtual Development Economics Seminar
Du 24/09/2024 de 16:00 à 17:00
Zoom
CASSEN Guilhem (University of Namur)
Political Determinants of the News Market: Novel Data and Quasi-Experimental. Evidence from India
écrit avec Julia Cagé (Sciences Po), Francesca Jensenius (University of Oslo)
Information conveyed through news media influences political behavior. But to what extent are media markets themselves shaped by political determinants? We build a novel panel dataset of newspaper markets in India from 2002 to 2017 to measure the impact of changes in apportionment on how news markets develop over time. We exploit the announcement of an exogenous change in the boundaries of electoral constituencies to causally identify the relationship between the (future) apportionment of news markets and the change in the number and circulation of newspapers. Using an event-study, a staggered difference-in-differences approach and placebos, we show that markets that became more electorally important experienced a significant rise in both circulation and the number of titles per capita. We document how effects vary with prior levels of political competition and newspapers’ characteristics, and discuss implications for voting behavior and democratic accountability.
Paris Trade Seminar
Du 24/09/2024 de 15:15 à 16:30
Sciences Po, 28 rue des Saints-Pères, 75007 Paris (M° Saint Germain des prés), salle H401 / Jean-Paul Fitoussi
BLANCHARD Emily (Dartmouth)
Justice for Sale: Explaining the Rise in Investor-State Dispute Settlement
écrit avec Monika Sztajerowska (PSE and IMF)
We build a novel database linking the universe of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS)
cases with detailed financial, ownership, and operating data for the foreign investors ini-
tiating these disputes, from 2000-2020. We document a sharp and sustained increase in
the number of ISDS cases that is not explained by changes in the scope of international
investment treaties or the expansion of multinational firms’ global operations. This in-
crease in case initiation corresponds instead to a fundamental change in the composition
of ISDS-suing firms, with significantly more small and credit-constrained firms pursuing
litigation against sovereign states after the mid 2000s. Guided by theory, and augmenting
our database with hand-collected information on case(-investor) specific choice of litigation
technology, we find evidence that the advent and expansion of third-party funding (TPF)
can explain a significant share of the observed increase in ISDS cases over the past two
decades. Further analysis suggests that third party funding may also increase firms’ odds
of winning, which could induce additional disputes in the years to come.
STEP (Seminar of Trade Economists in Paris)
Du 24/09/2024 de 14:00 à 15:00
Science Po
CORCOS Gregory (ENSAE & Polytechnique)
Firm-level export and import survival over the business cycle
écrit avec Silviano Esteve-Pérez, Salvador Gil-Pareja and Yuanzhe Tang
This paper examines how business cycle conditions affect the dynamics of exporting and importing firms, using micro-level data on trade spells initiated by French firms over the period 1998-2015. First, we find evidence of firm reallocation during recessions. Entry rates fall while exit rates increase. Both entrants and exiters exhibit higher productivity, suggesting tougher selection into export and import participation. Second, business cycle conditions at times of entry have persistent effects on exporters and importers: cohorts ’born’ in recessions have a systematically lower exit rate at any age. They also exhibit persistently different characteristics from firms that enter in better times. In the case of exports, cohorts born at recessions and booms display a similar age-dependence path. In other words, firms entering export markets in a recession enjoy a one-off premium to their spell duration prospects. Third, conclusions are largely unaffected when we use a joint model of export and import duration. Our estimates reveal a positive correlation in the unobservable factors explaining both decisions. To put it simply, exporters-importers tend to have either short-short or long-long spells. Overall, our results suggest that business cycle conditions affect trade participation in the short- and long-run, with recessions having both ’cleansing’ and ’scarring’ effects.
Applied Economics Lunch Seminar
Du 24/09/2024 de 12:30 à 13:30
R221
WIDMER Philine (PSE)
On the Effects of Recommender Algorithms
We examine the impact of Twitter/X's recommender algorithm on political attitudes. In a field experiment, we randomly assigned active U.S.-based users to either an algorithmic feed or a reverse-chronological feed for seven weeks, measuring their political attitudes and online behavior. Several key findings emerged: Switching from a reverse-chronological to an algorithmic feed increases user engagement and shifts political opinions toward more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump, and views on the war in Ukraine. Using NLP methods to analyze the content of users' feeds, we confirm that the algorithm promotes more conservative content. In contrast, we do not find symmetrical effects among users randomized to switch from the algorithmic feed to the reverse-chronological feed, suggesting that exposure to recommender algorithms persistently affects political attitudes.