The Political Risks of Separating (Local) News from Entertainment

This paper examines how consumer preferences for news and entertainment affect political accountability, particularly in the context of the transition from traditional to digital media. As news and entertainment content are easier to access separately, consumers can more readily substitute news with entertainment. Using a two-period principal-agent model, I analyze how voters’ time allocation between these two options influences an incumbent politician’s rent-seeking behavior. The model shows that when entertainment is favored over news, the increased substitutability leads to higher rent-seeking behavior by politicians. As a result, subsidizing journalism may fail to boost news consumption if entertainment remains easily accessible. I conclude by discussing potential policy interventions aimed at strengthening public scrutiny and improving voter welfare. This framework helps explain the ongoing decline of local journalism in many democratic countries.
Presented at:
Nottingham Interdisciplinary Centre for Economic and Political Research (NICEP) 2024 conference
IX Hurwicz Workshop on Mechanism Design Theory in Warsaw
UniCatt Political Economy Research Day in Milan

Is Your Faculty All Male Because of Tenure Requirements?
Experimental Evidence From Economics Job Market Candidates

with Maria Cubel and Christina Sarah Hauser
We investigate the effect of tenure requirements on the supply of female candidates for academic positions in Economics. Economic research is known for having a “leaky pipeline”: Despite high early-stage academic achievements, only few women reach tenured positions. Within a hypothetical choice experiment, we aim to quantify the willingness of PhD candidates in economics to give up salary, low teaching loads, or prestigious positions for jobs with less stringent tenure requirements. We hypothesize that high publication requirements for tenure deter female economists from pursuing a career in academia. Our findings aim to inform policies to retain female talent in academia.

Losing capital status: does it matter for a city’s development?

In 1999, the number of first-level administrative regions in Poland was reduced from 49 to 16. As a result, 31 cities lost the status of capital (“ex-capitals”). This was followed by, inter alia, the decline in employment in local public administration, lower transfers from the central government, and, since 2004, lack of opportunity to manage EU funds. Moreover, the reform also changed a two-tier system of administrative division into three-tier. All “ex-capitals” became capitals of second-tier regions, together with other 35 municipalities. While the reform improved the overall efficiency of public administration, its impact on the “losing” municipalities has not been explored in the economics literature. As few ``natural experiments" exist, there is little evidence on how the loss of capital status can affect a city’s development This paper contributes to the literature with a causal analysis of the impact of the loss of capital status on a wide range of socioeconomic outcomes.
I use data from the Main Statistical Office in Poland. The part covering 1990-2000 is novel, digitized from the Office’s archives. This dataset covers around 100 variables describing the labor market, living conditions, real estate market, healthcare, education, culture, and demographics.
Presented at:
Political Economy reading group at Department of Economics at SciencesPo
ICES Brown Bag Lecture, George Mason University

Abortion ban and health outcomes of women and infants

with Monika Raulinajtys-Grzybek and Alessandro Tarozzi
Poland and fourteen U.S. states have restricted abortion in 2021 and 2022, making them the only high-income countries having passed regressive reproduction laws in recent years. In the case of Poland, the abortion law before the restriction had already been one of the strictest in Europe. The 2021 restriction furthermore banned abortions on embryo-pathological grounds, which in 2019 constituted 98% of legal abortions in Poland. Now abortion is only permitted in cases of rape, incest, or a threat to the mother’s health and life. How has this law affected the health outcomes of infants and women? We answer this question with hospital-level data in Poland. This study aims to contribute to the relatively scarce literature on the impact ofrestrictive abortion laws on the health outcomes of both infants and women in a high-income country.
Presented at:
Health Econonomics of Risky Health Behavior workshop, University of Bologna

An evaluation of integration policies for Ukrainian refugee children in Poland

with Agnieszka Kozakoszczak, Urszula Markowska-Manista, Mikołaj Pawlak, Zuzanna Samson and Alessandro Tarozzi
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused an enormous inflow of refugees into Poland, including many children. About 350,000 Ukrainian school-aged children entered Polish schools, but integration is challenging, both because of the traumatic transition, difficult historical experiences, and because Polish and Ukrainian are related, but distinct, Slavic languages. Also, older students sometimes only attend online courses offered in Ukraine. To help children with schoolwork and integration, schools can hire “cross-cultural assistants” (CCAs). CCAs have to know Polish but are not required to have a degree in pedagogy, although most used to be teachers in Ukraine before the war. However, currently, there are approximately 140 refugee pupils per CCA. Such low numbers are problematic both for children’s learning and social integration, and because they leave many Ukrainian refugee teachers outside of the school system. Recently, the Polish government has decided to increase the number of CCAs (the objective is to have 1 CCA per 20 Ukrainian pupils), which until now were often funded irregularly by donors. This policy change, planned to be implemented as early as January 2025, offers an opportunity to study how CCAs can improve the integration of Ukrainian refugee children into Polish schools, through a collaboration between EUI researchers with researchers and stakeholders in Poland. Furthermore, the project aims to broadly study the case of a large-scale influx of refugees from Ukraine into Poland, in order to gauge how the learning and social integration of refugee children is affected by the presence of support teachers who are themselves refugees from the same country.