Gerard Padró I Miquel Publications

Two opposed interested parties (IPs) compete to influence citizens with heterogeneous priors which receive news items produced by a variety of sources. The IPs fight to capture the coverage conveyed in these items. We characterize the equilibrium level of capture of item as well as the equilibrium level of information transmission. Capture increases the prevalence of the ex ante most informative messages and can explain the empirical distribution of slant at the news-item level. Opposite capturing efforts do not cancel each other and instead undermine social learning as rational citizens discount informative messages. Citizen skepticism makes efforts to capture the news strategic substitutes. Because of strategic substitution, competition for influence is compatible with horizontal differentiation between successful media. In equilibrium, rational citizens choose to consume messages from aligned sources despite knowledge of the bias in a manner consistent with recent empirical evidence.

We posit that autocrats introduce local elections when their bureaucratic capacity is low. Local elections exploit citizens’ informational advantage in keeping local officials accountable, but they also weaken vertical control. As bureaucratic capacity increases, the autocrat limits the role of elected bodies to regain vertical control. We argue that these insights can explain the introduction of village elections in rural China and the subsequent erosion of village autonomy years later. We construct a novel dataset to document political reforms, policy outcomes, and de facto power for almost four decades. We find that the introduction of elections improves popular policies and weakens unpopular ones. Increases in regional government resources lead to loss of village autonomy, but less so in remote villages. These patterns are consistent with an organizational view of local elections within autocracies.

While intergenerational transmission of entrepreneurship is a well-known regularity, we hypothesize that in a transition economy where the state retains an important role, those whose parents are government workers may also be more likely to become business owners. We test the hypothesis in China and show that (1) on average, both entrepreneurs and government workers have a higher likelihood of having children who own incorporated businesses and (2) In provinces where government involvement is higher, the likelihood that children of government workers (entrepreneurs) own incorporated businesses is significantly higher (lower). Our study demonstrates that the local economic business environment shapes the influence of parental background on business ownership.