Julia Cage

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at Sciences Po Paris

We study France’s 1995 ban on firm donations to politicians. We use a difference-in-differences approach and a novel dataset combining the campaign manifestos issued by candidates running in French parliamentary elections with data on their campaign contributions. We show that banning firm donations discourages candidates from advertising their loc...

I comment on the article in this collection by Ansell and Gingrich, who highlight the concept of political inequality. Then they investigate empirically whether political inequality has risen in line with economic inequality over the past few decades in the UK. This is an important question, as political inequality can easily generate an inequality...

Inequality in political participation and influence has strongly increased in recent decades, breeding economic inequality. In this review, we focus on three aspects of political inequality: the increasing concentration of both political and charitable donations, the growing gap in descriptive representation, and the persistent lack of substantive...

Technological innovations like broadcast television and the internet challenge local newspapers’ business model of bundling their local content with third-party content, such as wire national news. We examine how the entry of television affected newspapers and news diets in the United States. We construct a dataset of newspapers’ economic performan...

In this article, we apply recent short-text embeddings techniques to the automatic detection of events in a stream of tweets. We model this task as a dynamic clustering problem. Our experiments are conducted on a publicly available English corpus of tweets and on a French similar dataset annotated by our team. We show that recent techniques based o...

We measure how a network of heroes can legitimize and diffuse extreme political behaviors. We exploit newly declassified intelligence files, novel voting data, and regimental histories to show that home municipalities of French line regiments arbitrarily rotated under Philippe Pétain’s generalship through the heroic World War I battlefield of Verdu...

What is the impact of campaign spending on votes? Does it vary across election types, political parties or electoral settings? Estimating these effects requires comprehensive data on spending across candidates, parties and elections, as well as identification strategies that handle the endogenous and strategic nature of campaign spending in multipa...

La crise des médias et la défiance des citoyens envers l'information grandissent chaque jour et notre conviction est que cette situation n’a rien d’inéluctable. La confiance peut être regagnée en traitant le problème à la racine : la propriété des médias.Comment les citoyens peuvent-ils accorder leur confiance aux médias si aucune règle claire n’em...

News production requires investment, and competitors’ ability to appropriate a story may reduce a media’s incentives to provide original content. Yet, there is little legal protection of intellectual property rights in online news production, which raises the issue of the extent of copying online and the incentives to provide original content. In t...

La démocratie n’existe pas. Elle reste à inventer.Loin d’être un refus de la politique, la crise actuelle de la démocratie représentative se manifeste par le combat de citoyens demandant davantage de démocratie, de participation et d’égalité. Libres et égaux en voix propose ainsi de donner une voix et des places à celles et ceux qui en ont été trop...

This paper investigates the long-term impact of historical missionary activity on HIV in sub-Saharan Africa. On the one hand, missionaries were the first to invest in modern medicine in the region. On the other hand, Christianity influenced sexual beliefs and behaviors that affect the risk of contagion. We build a new geocoded dataset locating Prot...

In this work, we evaluate the performance of recent text embeddings for the automatic detection of events in a stream of tweets. We model this task as a dynamic clustering problem.Our experiments are conducted on a publicly available corpus of tweets in English and on a similar dataset in French annotated by our team. We show that recent techniques...

This paper investigates the impact of increased media competition on the quantity and quality of news provided and, ultimately, on political participation. I build a new county-level panel dataset of local newspaper presence, newspapers' number of journalists, costs and revenues and political turnout in France, from 1944 to 2014. I estimate the eff...

This article examines the impact of trade liberalization on government revenues. Using a new dataset on tax revenues for 130 countries between 1792 and 2006, we identify ninety-nine episodes of trade liberalization defined as a large fall in trade tax revenues not accompanied by a decrease in trade. Seven took place before World War One, seven in t...

Une personne, une voix : la démocratie repose sur une promesse d’égalité qui trop souvent vient se fracasser sur le mur de l’argent. Financement des campagnes, dons aux partis politiques, prise de contrôle des médias : depuis des décennies, le jeu démocratique est de plus en plus capturé par les intérêts privés.Se fondant sur une étude inédite des...

This paper is part of a wider work studying the co-influences of Twitter and the production of information by traditional media. A strong prerequisite of this study is to collect, with the limitations of the Twitter API, tweets linked to media events that are representative of the real Twitter activity. This paper describes two proposed approaches...

Qui possède les médias ? Il s’avère extraordinairement difficile de répondre à cette question simple. En France, l’ordonnance du 26 août 1944 du Conseil National de la Résistance rendait obligatoire – entre de multiples autres règles – la publication sur chaque exemplaire de journaux du nom des actionnaires et de leur profession. Ces règles n’ont,...

Le développement de l'information sur Internet conduit-il au règne du copié-collé, au détriment de l'information de qualité ? Peut-on inventer de nouveaux modèles économiques pour les médias permettant de tirer le meilleur parti des nouvelles technologies ? Cet ouvrage apporte de nouvelles réponses à ces questions, en conjuguant les outils du big d...

Throughout history, religious change is known to have brought about significant economic change in many countries. This column, taken from a recent Vox eBook, looks at the effects of the Christian missionary activity that expanded throughout African countries from the middle of the 19th century. It shows how the diversity of investments brought by...

Le « pair à pair » (P2P) est un système de distribution coopérative qui utilise des ressources distribuées pour accomplir des fonctions essentielles de manière décentralisée. Notre travail repose sur une synthèse de la littérature économique, d’une part, et sur l’analyse d’une base de données de réseaux P2P, d’autre part. La littérature économique...

This article investigates the long-term consequences of the printing press in the nineteenth century sub-Saharan Africa on social capital nowadays. Protestant missionaries were the first to import the printing press and to allow the indigenous population to use it. We build a new geocoded dataset locating Protestant missions in 1903. This dataset i...

We build an endogenous growth model to analyze the relationships between taxation, corruption, and economic growth. Entrepreneurs lie at the center of the model and face disincentive effects from taxation but acquire positive benefits from public infrastructure. Political corruption governs the efficiency with which tax revenues are translated into...

This article questions the relevance of the different measures of policy performance that are currently used by international organizations to allocate Official Development Assistance (ODA). It evaluates more especially the pertinence of the World Bank’s Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA) and of the various alternatives that have be...

This paper studies the effect of firm and country reputation on exports when buyers cannot observe quality prior to purchase. Firm-level demand is determined by expected quality, which is driven by the dynamics of consumer learning through experience and the country of origin's reputation for quality. We show that asymmetric information can result...

Les médias sont en crise. Pas seulement la presse écrite, mais toute la chaîne de production de l’information. Confrontés à une concurrence croissante et à une baisse inexorable des recettes publicitaires, les journaux, les radios, les télévisions, les pure players sont tous à la recherche d’un nouveau modèle. Fondé sur une étude inédite des médias...

This article questions the relevance of the different measures of policy performance that are currently used by international organizations to allocate development aid. It evaluates more especially the pertinence of the World Bank’s Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA). Using a cross-country panel dataset over 146 countries between 19...

This paper puts the recent evolution of tax revenues in developing countries in historical perspective. Using a novel dataset on total and trade tax revenues we compare the fiscal cost of trade liberalization in developing countries and in today's rich countries at earlier stages of development. We find that trade liberalization episodes led to lar...

Information is costly to produce but cheap to reproduce. Who are the main providers of original news in the online world, and are they rewarded for this? What are the benefits of breaking out a story, and how does information propagate? This paper addresses these issues by exploiting a unique dataset including all online content produced by general...

The focus of this chapter is on the economics of sub-Saharan African media. Using the history of sub-Saharan African newspapers as well as historical evidence from Europe and the United States, I study the emergence of market-oriented journalism and of an independent and informative press in sub-Saharan Africa. I document the extent to which sub-Sa...

This article delves into the relationship between newspaper readership and civic attitudes, and its effect on economic development. To this end, we investigate the long-term consequences of the introduction of the printing press in the 19th century. In sub-Saharan Africa, Protestant missionaries were the first both to import the printing press tech...

This paper studies the effect of firm and country reputation on exports when buyers cannot observe quality prior to purchase. Firm-level demand is determined by expected quality, which is driven by the dynamics of consumer learning through experience and the country of origin’s reputation for quality. We show that asymmetric information can result...

Trade taxes are an important source of revenue for developing countries. These revenues have fallen over the past decades as these countries liberalized trade. Many developing countries simultaneously experienced a decrease in their total tax revenues, suggesting trade liberalization may have come at a fiscal cost. Using a novel panel dataset of ta...