Research

_Abstract:

_{Support for populist and authoritarian regimes is rising worldwide, despite evidence that they tend to underperform economically. We examine the role of (mis)perceptions of regime performance as drivers of political attitudes, leveraging two survey experiments with 11,377 respondents during Argentina’s 2023 presidential elections. Optimistic beliefs about the performance of populist and non-democratic regimes were widespread, and displayed a strong correlation with support for these regimes. When exposed to randomly assigned informational treatments challenging optimistic views about these political regimes, individuals significantly adjusted their beliefs, and reduced their support for candidates they associate with populist and authoritarian leanings. Exploring the impact of different information sources, we find that academic sources and newspapers were more influential than social media. Although individuals adjusted their beliefs and attitudes in response to information on regime performance, contradicting their prior beliefs reduced their demand for additional information, consistent with an important role for motivated reasoning.}

Link: WP

_Abstract:

_{We experimentally study the interplay between political and other social identities in forming social ties in a context of intense political polarization. We created accounts on Twitter that signaled their political preference for one of the two leading candidates in the 2022 Brazilian Presidential election, their preference for a football club (interpreted as an affective dimension of identity, given football’s importance to socialization in Brazil), or both. The bots randomly followed Twitter accounts with congruent and incongruent identities across these dimensions. We computed the proportion of followbacks and blocks received. Both dimensions of identity are relevant to forming ties, but the effect of sharing political identity is larger. Moreover, affective identity becomes substantially less relevant when information about political identity is available, indicating that political identity can overshadow the affective dimension. Still, shared affective identity has a positive effect in fostering ties even among politically opposite individuals. This suggests that shared affective identities have the potential to reduce politically induced societal divides, despite this effect being lower in a polarized setting.}

Link: WP

_Abstract:

_{Populists govern more of the world’s countries than at any point in the past century, on both the right and the left. What they share is not an economic programme but a worldview that casts politics as a struggle between ordinary citizens and a self-serving establishment, a conflict that is zero-sum at its core. We show that exposure to this political environment leaves a durable imprint on citizens’ beliefs. Combining data on populist leaders with surveys of more than 260,000 respondents in 53 countries, we exploit within-country-survey-year variation across birth cohorts and find that greater exposure during early adulthood is associated with stronger zero-sum beliefs later in life. The result is replicated in two independent surveys and across multiple measures of zero-sum thinking and perceived economic conflict and persists into respondents’ mid-forties. The associations extend to voting intentions: exposure does not predict support for populist parties overall, but it does predict support for ideologically extreme parties aligned with the populist rule experienced in early adulthood. The mechanism evidence provides little support for an economic-scarcity explanation and instead points towards a rhetorical channel, as populist rule features substantially more anti-elite rhetoric in two independent measures and more domestic zero-sum framing in United Nations speeches.}

Link: WP

_Abstract:

_{This paper investigates the impact of a progressive tax reform on tax compliance. We leverage a major progressive tax reform in a large Argentine municipality. First, we use a quasi-experimental design to estimate the causal effect of changes in a household’s own tax rates on its tax compliance. Second, we utilize a large-scale natural field experiment to examine whether, holding a household’s own tax rates constant, tax compliance is influenced by the tax rates of poorer or richer households. We find that reducing taxes for poorer households increases their compliance, while increasing taxes for richer households decreases their compliance. When poor households learn about the tax hike on the rich, this increases their perceived fairness of the tax system and their tax compliance. When rich households learn about the tax cuts for the poor, their perceived fairness increases significantly, but their compliance, if anything, goes down. Leveraging another reform (and another field experiment) that took place a year later, we show that both the quasi-experimental and experimental findings replicate. Our evidence highlights that tax compliance depends not only on a household’s own tax rate but also on its perception of the broader tax schedule. Our findings also highlight the gap between stated and revealed preferences for redistribution. Lastly, we conduct a counterfactual analysis to illustrate the implications of our findings for the design of tax policies.}

Link: WP

_Abstract:

_{AI-powered chatbots can scale behavioral interventions at significantly lower costs. This study tests an intervention designed to address teacher shortages by motivating high school students to pursue education degrees. We randomly assigned students to three groups: a control group, a human promoter arm where trained staff delivered the intervention via WhatsApp, and a chatbot arm where AI bots trained on identical material replicated the human approach. While the human arm showed no significant increase in students’ applications to education majors compared to control, the chatbot arm produced positive, marginally significant effects. Text analysis of the interactions reveals systematic differences between chatbot-student and human-student interactions across several dimensions, which could explain their different effectiveness. Chatbot conversations are faster and thus more efficient at delivering information without sacrificing topic coverage or response quality. Chatbots receive more factual questions and provide answers with greater semantic alignment to those questions compared to human promoters. In contrast, human promoters engage in more empathetic conversations. These findings show the potential of AI chatbots to deliver effective behavioral interventions at scale.}

Link: WP

_Abstract:

_{This paper examines how the act of giving advice to others can serve as a tool for self-persuasion in high-stakes decisions. We test this hypothesis in Peru’s nationwide teacher selection process, involving over 74,000 candidates. By prompting teachers to advise peers on selecting schools for maximum social impact, we observe a significant shift in their own choices: an increased probability of choosing and being assigned to hard-to-staff schools—institutions serving poorer areas that are typically understaffed. Aligning with recent literature in behavioral sciences, our findings demonstrate that advising others can influence one’s own consequential decisions. This insight offers a cost-effective approach to mitigating teacher sorting, a pressing issue that contributes to educational inequality.}

Link: WP