Ongoing projects:
Losing capital status: does it matter for a city’s development?
Draft - August 2025
YouTube one minute pitch
How do changes in the administrative hierarchy of cities impact their development? This paper focuses on losing a regional capital status, using the context of the 1999 administrative reform in Poland. Exploiting variation in administrative statuses, I compare ex-capitals to newly created “city-counties” and county seats to construct a causal estimate of losing capital status. I find that ex-capital cities experienced a persistent decline in public sector activity, female labor force participation, fertility, and local public good provision, despite receiving higher central government transfers. These results are consistent with a simple theoretical model where a fall in administrative capacity induces sectoral employment reallocation and delayed migration responses. The findings highlight that administrative status is important for city-level development and that the loss of such status has negative consequences, even when paired with increased fiscal autonomy.
Presented at:
Political Economy reading group at Department of Economics at SciencesPo
ICES Brown Bag Lecture, George Mason University
EUI Microeconometrics Working Group
EUI Alumni Conference
IMD Days in Warsaw
The Political Risks of Separating News from Entertainment
Draft - August 2025
One of the aspects of the ongoing digital revolution is the easier separability of media content. I focus on news and entertainment: how consumer preferences can affect political accountability if both of these contents become easily substitutable? Using a two-period electoral accountability model, I analyze how voters’ attention allocation between these two options influences an incumbent politician’s effort.
The model shows that when entertainment is favored over news, the increased substitutability leads to lower welfare for voters. However, a very high demand for news might motivate a bad incumbent to exert too much effort, boosting her re-election probabilities. This is not good for voters, as a re-elected bad incumbent never exerts any effort in the second period. I also show how the distribution of interest in the public good among voters matters for the demand for news: in the context I study, it is the most stable when the distribution is uniform. Therefore, with the interest in public good widely dispersed in the population, the public scrutiny is stronger.
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.
Quasi-total Abortion Ban in Poland and Health of Women and Infants
with Alessandro Tarozzi
What happens when restrictive reproductive laws in a developed country become one of the most restrictive in the world? We study the impact of the 2021 quasi-total abortion ban in Poland, which prohibited terminations on the grounds of fetal anomaly, previously accounting for the vast majority of legal abortions. Using monthly administrative records from all Polish hospitals between 2017 and 2023, we document an immediate and near-complete collapse of legal abortions following the ruling. In an event-study framework that exploits regional variation in pre-ban access, we find no meaningful changes in the number of births or miscarriages, but detect short-run increases in neonatal and birth mortality. However, these effects are not persistent, and our results overall do not reveal robust or lasting impacts on maternal or infant health outcomes, beyond the sharp reduction in abortion availability.
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
Website of the project
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.