Research
Research
This article examines how military losses shape public engagement with propaganda. We combine data on Russia's military losses in its war against Ukraine with unique data from social media groups of Russian public schools to estimate the effect of war fatality reports on engagement with patriotic and pro-regime propaganda. Exploiting idiosyncrasies in the timing of these reports for identification, we document a sustained decline of up to 36% in likes, shares, and views for content promoting the authorities after the first such report in a municipality. Engagement with patriotic propaganda increases, but this increase is limited to the first year of the invasion and at some point the effect reverses. The effects are most pronounced in educated, populous, and young municipalities and where the obituaries appear in school groups, highlighting how information access shapes the public response to propaganda. Further analysis of the obituaries with a large semantic model shows that users engage most with personal stories of the KIA soldiers and disengage when their deaths are framed within nationalistic and pro-regime narratives. Together, these patterns suggest that war fatalities can hinder the spread of propaganda and erode public support for and reach of the state-controlled narratives during the conflict.
In this paper, I address collective memory as a potential transmission vehicle and study how the commemoration of political violence might promote the associated effects. I exploit variation in the location of 1930s political arrest sites in Moscow and in the locations of memorial plaques that commemorate these arrests. I find that individuals currently residing nearby the arrest sites are less likely to engage in pro-social behavior, namely online donations. Most importantly, the effect appears insignificant in the absence of commemoration. These findings suggest that commemoration and collective memory revitalization might play a crucial role in the persistence of historical legacies even in transient communities.
We investigate the effect of fear on public demand for state intervention. Our identification strategy leverages a unique quasi-experiment in Russia, where an episode of a popular health-related TV show aired misinformation on virus-fatality risks during our survey on pandemic behavior. Isolating the exogenous variation in fear of infection with a shift-share instrument based on the unanticipated timing of this episode and pre-Covid spatial variation in the show’s popularity, we find that fear substantially increases demand for regulation, governmental healthcare spending, and unemployment support while leaving policies unrelated to Covid-19, like censorship or housing, unaffected. Mechanism analysis reveals that fear enhances perceptions of others’ noncompliance, consistent with theories of regulation that highlight free-riding concerns.
This study investigates whether news about corruption can affect the likelihood of sovereign default by examining the impact of Alexei Navalny's blog posts on Russian sovereign debt markets from 2008 to 2011. It focuses on how Navalny's blog posts about corruption in state-affiliated companies influenced sovereign spreads after the Global Financial Crisis. The analysis uses data on sovereign spreads and the timing of Navalny's posts, showing that unexpected disclosures of corruption in Russian state-owned enterprises (SOEs) significantly increased sovereign borrowing costs. The findings indicate a statistically significant relationship, with corruption revelations explaining up to two-thirds of daily variation in sovereign spreads in 2008–2009, especially when oil prices were low. This research underscores the importance of sovereign credibility, the role of independent media in exposing corruption, and the broader economic mechanisms beyond sovereign debt. It highlights the critical role of information transparency and anti-corruption efforts in maintaining sovereign credibility and debt market stability.
The Neolithic transition, marked by the shift from hunting and gathering to sedentary farming and herding, has been proposed as a potential contributor to persistent changes in labor-related gender norms and ongoing gender inequality in the labor market. In this study, we test this hypothesis using a novel dataset of sustainable genetic markers, specifically Y-DNA haplogroups associated with the Neolithic transition, to trace Neolithic ancestry in contemporaneous populations. Our findings indicate that countries with higher levels of Neolithic ancestry have lower female labor force participation rates and residents with more gender-discriminatory attitudes towards female labor market participation. Conversely, locations with higher levels of hunting-gathering ancestry exhibit the opposite trend. These results are consistent at the country level, individual level, and for subsamples of second-generation migrants with respect to the agricultural ancestry of their country of origin. They also remain robust to the use of alternative datasets of genetic markers and the inclusion of a wide range of control variables. Moreover, our Neolithic ancestry measure is a better predictor than related measures such as years since the Neolithic transition, grammatical gender intensity or plough use. We conclude that differences in gender roles and norms can be traced back to a persistent cultural response to the change in the division of labor between genders that resulted from the Neolithic Revolution.