Alesina Seminar on Political Economy

Speaker & Title Greg Martin (Stanford), "Agenda Setting and Market Power in Online News" Abstract How much power do news outlets have to "set the agenda:" to determine what events their audience hears about and which topics it thinks are important? The...

Tara Slough (NYU), "Bureaucratic Incentives and Data Production: Evidence from Social Registries" Abstract How do local politicians influence their constituents’ access to national means-tested social programs? I argue that they do so through personnel...

John Duggan (University of Rochester), "Multidimensional Elections" (w/ Avidit Acharya) Abstract An enduring challenge in the political economy of elections is to construct a tractable model of two-candidate elections that accommodates multidimensional...

Andrew Hall (Stanford), "Investing in Political Expertise: The Remarkable Scale of Corporate Policy Teams" Abstract In this paper, we define and measure a previously unstudied channel by which companies react to, and attempt to shape, politics: internal...

Speaker & Title Avidit Acharya (Stanford), "Motivated Reasoning and Information Aggregation" Abstract If agents engage in motivated reasoning, how does that affect the aggregation of information in society? We study the effects of motivated reasoning in...

Speaker & Title Noam Yuchtman (London School of Economics), "Legal Therapy: Coercion, the Courts, and Structural Transformation in China" Abstract Limitations to property and labor rights are widely seen as facilitating China’s growth miracle – including...

Speaker & Title Jake Brown (Boston University), "The Effect of Childhood Environment on Political Behavior: Evidence from Young U.S. Movers, 1992-2021" Abstract We ask how childhood environment shapes political behavior. We measure young voters’...

Speaker & Title Gautam Nair (HKS), "Group-targeted wealth transfers reduce inequality and intergroup conflict but trigger policy backlash" Abstract Persistent group disparities are a global policy challenge. Large, targeted wealth transfers—such as those...

Speaker & Title Elias Papaioannou (London Business School), "The Industrial Revolution and Forced Labor in Colonial Africa" (with Julian Marenz and Stelios Michalopoulos) Abstract TBA

Speaker & Title Victoria Mooers (University of Chicago), "Social Networks and Voter Information" Abstract Informed voters are essential for government accountability, and social networks are an important avenue through which voters acquire political...