Working papers [newest drafts available upon request]
Working papers [newest drafts available upon request]
Corruption and Extremism (joint with Tommaso Giommoni, Massimo Morelli, and Antonio Nicolò) - ACCEPTED at JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS.
This paper shows that corruption generates extremism, but only on the opposition side. When the majority has a greater ability to use corruption to obtain their favorite policy outcome, corruption does not provide incentives to select a more extreme representative on the majority side. On the other hand, opposition voters perceive that in a more corrupt system, a moderate representative can more easily concede to the majority and, hence, may desire to switch to a more extreme (and hence less likely to compromise on policy positions) representative. We provide causal evidence for these novel asymmetric predictions for Indonesia and Brazil.
Biased Perceptions of Electoral Irregularities: Evidence from Hungary (with Gábor Simonovits and Andrea Szabó) - Under Review at AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEW
We study perceptions of electoral integrity in Hungary using surveys and experimental data on over 4,000 poll workers that served during the 2022 general elections as observers and vote-counters. We first demonstrate that reports of irregularities were more common in areas prone to fraud, but were also shaped by the prior suspicion of poll workers suggesting that reports were partly driven by motivated reasoning. To rule out alternative explanations such as the selection of poll workers to ex-ante riskier areas, more vigilance exerted by more suspicious poll workers and “overinterpretation” of evidence driven by stereotypes, we fielded an experiment to the same poll workers where they evaluated hypothetical scenarios that were either perfectly legal, ambiguous, or unequivocally fraudulent Beliefs about fraud had a similar impact on perception as observing actual violations, questioning the reliability of survey-based measures of election fraud.
Print It Yourself! The Electoral Impact of Door-to-door Newsletter Distribution when Legacy Media is Captured (with Flóra Drucker)
We evaluate the impact of a door-to-door campaign on the outcome of the 2022 legislative election in Hungary. Its goal was to facilitate voters' access to information by distributing weekly newsletters that compiled news stories from independent online outlets that were largely absent from the overwhelmingly pro-government legacy media. Though the circulation was not randomized, we exploited a host of settlement-level socio-economic characteristics, past election history, and proxies of contemporaneous campaign efforts made by politicians, as well as GPS data on activists' routes for identification. We find small but significant positive impacts on 1) turnout, 2) opposition vote share, 3) invalid vote shares in a government-backed anti-LGBTQ referendum; and mostly no effect on ruling party support. These results constitute novel evidence for the effectiveness of door-to-door campaigning in a competitive autocracy while contributing to the existing body of evidence on the impact of access to information in a captured media environment.
Mass Reproducibility and Replicability: A New Hope (as minor contributing author to Abel Brodeur, Derek Mikola, Nikolai Cook et al.)
Publications
Social Mobility and Political Regimes: Intergenerational Mobility in Hungary, 1949-2017 (with Pawel Bukowski, Gregory Clark and Rita Pető) JOURNAL OF POPULATION ECONOMICS
[Portfolio.hu] [Magyar Nemzet Interview] [Replication package]
Inequality Perception and Preferences Globally and Locally - Correlational Evidence From a Large-Scale Cross - Country Survey (With Carmen Cervone, Federica Durante, Anne Maass, Caterina Suitner, Roberta Valtorta, and Michela Vezzoli) JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC INEQUALITY
[Blog post in English] [Replication package]
A Twofold-Subjective Measure of Income Inequality (With Carmen Cervone, Federica Durante, Anne Maass, Caterina Suitner, Roberta Valtorta, and Michela Vezzoli) SOCIAL INDICATORS RESEARCH [corresponding code]
Why are some countries rich and others poor? development and validation of the attributions for Cross-Country Inequality Scale (With Carmen Cervone, Federica Durante, Anne Maass, Caterina Suitner, Roberta Valtorta, and Michela Vezzoli) PLOS ONE
Work in progress
Workfare and Clientelism (with Győző Gyöngyösi and Balázs Reizer) [A somewhat dated earlier draft] [Telex.hu]
“Deny Thy Father and Refuse Thy Name” - Nation Building and the Salary Differential of Family Name Changers in Hungary (with Rita Pető) [slides]
Sympathy for the Devil? Right-wing terrorism and political behavior in Hungary (with Gábor Békés and Gábor Simonovits)
Technology adoption, labor substitution, and political preferences (with Győző Gyöngyösi)
Genius Loci - The Spatial Persistence of Human Capital through Historical Trauma (with Miklós Koren)
Social mobility and political regimes - evidence from two centuries of Hungarian data (with Pawel Bukowski, Gregory Clark, and Rita Pető)
Asymmetric Extremism - Theory and evidence from Sharia regulations in Indonesia
Publications in Hungarian
Average wages in exceptional times - Hungarian earnings in the first 18 months of the COVID pandemic [English translation]