Published Articles (click on the titles for link to the full tests from an open-source research depositary):
Attack When the World is Not Watching? U.S. News and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Ruben Durante and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, Journal of Political Economy, (2018) 126 (3): 1085-1133. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/697202
Politicians may strategically time unpopular measures to coincide with newsworthy events that distract the media and the public. We test this hypothesis in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We find that Israeli attacks are more likely to occur when U.S. news on the following day are dominated by important predictable events. Strategic timing applies to attacks that bear risk of civilian casualties and are not too costly to postpone. Content analysis suggests that Israel's strategy aims at minimizing next-day coverage, which is especially charged with negative emotional content. Palestinian attacks do not appear to be timed to U.S. news.
Middleman Minorities and Ethnic Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms in the Russian Empire
Irena Grosfeld, Seyhun Orcan Sakalli, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, Review of Economic Studies, (2020) Volume 87, Issue 1, Pages 289–342. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/restud/rdz001
Using detailed panel data from the Pale of Settlement area between 1800 and 1927, we document that anti-Jewish pogroms--mob violence against the Jewish minority--broke out when economic shocks coincided with political turmoil. When this happened, pogroms primarily occurred in places where Jews dominated middleman occupations, i.e., moneylending and grain trading. This evidence is inconsistent with the scapegoating hypothesis, according to which Jews were blamed for all misfortunes of the majority. Instead, the evidence is consistent with the politico-economic mechanism, in which Jewish middlemen served as providers of insurance against economic shocks to peasants and urban grain buyers in a relationship based on repeated interactions. When economic shocks occurred in times of political stability, rolling over or forgiving debts was an equilibrium outcome because both sides valued their future relationship. In contrast, during political turmoil, debtors could not commit to paying in the future, and consequently, moneylenders and grain traders had to demand immediate (re)payment. This led to ethnic violence, in which the break in the relationship between the majority and Jewish middlemen was the igniting factor.
Facts, Alternative Facts, and Fact Checking in Times of Post-Truth Politics
Oscar Barrera, Emeric Henry, Sergei Guriev, Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, Journal of Pulic Economics, (2020), 182: 104123. DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2019.104123
How effective is fact checking in countervailing "alternative facts," i.e., misleading statements by politicians? In a randomized online experiment during the 2017 French presidential election campaign, we subjected subgroups of 2480 French voters to alternative facts by the extreme-right candidate, Marine Le Pen, and/or corresponding facts about the European refugee crisis from official sources. We find that: (i) alternative facts are highly persuasive; (ii) fact checking improves factual knowledge of voters (iii) but it does not affect policy conclusions or support for the candidate; (iv) exposure to facts alone does not decrease support for the candidate, even though voters update their knowledge. We find evidence consistent with the view that at least part of the effect can be explained by raising salience of the immigration issue.
Forced Migration and Human Capital: Evidence from Post-WWII Population Transfers
Sascha Becker, Irena Grosfeld, Pauline Grosjean, Nico Voigtländer, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya. American Economic Review,(2020), 110(5): 1430-63. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20181518
We study the long-run effects of forced migration on investment in education. After World War II, millions of Poles were forcibly uprooted from the Kresy territories of eastern Poland and resettled (primarily) in the newly acquired Western Territories, from which the Germans were expelled. We combine historical censuses with newly collected survey data to show that, while there were no pre-WWII differences in educational attainment, Poles with a family history of forced migration are significantly more educated today than other Poles. These results are driven by a shift in preferences away from material possessions toward investment in human capital.
Diffusion of Gender Norms:Evidence from Stalin’s Ethnic Deportations
Miho, Antonela, Alexandra Jarochkin, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya. Journal of European Economic Association (forthcoming) https://doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvad040
We study horizontal between-group cultural transmission using Stalin's ethnic deportations as a historical experiment. Over 2 million Soviet citizens, mostly Germans and Chechens, were forcibly relocated from the western to eastern parts of the USSR during WWII solely based on ethnicity. As a result, the native population of the deportation destinations was exogenously exposed to groups with drastically different gender norms and behavior. We combine historical and contemporary data to document that present-day gender equality in labor force participation, business leadership, and fertility as well as pro-gender-equality attitudes are higher among local native population of deportation destinations with a larger presence of Protestant compared to Muslim deportees. The effects are stronger for culturally closer groups and when adopting deportee norms is less costly. The results cannot be explained by selection, vertical cultural transmission, or deported impact on the local economy. The evidence strongly suggests that gender norms diffused horizontally from deportees to the local population through imitation and learning.
Discussion papers:
Independent Media, Propaganda, and Religiosity: Evidence from Poland
Grosfeld, Irena, Etienne Madinier, Seyhun Orcan Sakalli, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya. Revise and resulmit in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, this draft: June 2023. CEPR Discussion paper No. DP16250.
Exploring a drastic change in the media landscape in Poland, we show that mainstream media can significantly affect religious participation. After the nationalist populist party PiS came to power in 2015, news on state and private independent TV diverged due to propaganda on state TV, resulting in a switch of some of its audience to independent TV. Municipalities with access to independent TV continued to follow a long-term secularization trend, while municipalities with access only to state TV experienced a reversal of this trend. An online experiment sheds light on the mechanisms underlying the effect of exposure to independent news on religiosity.
Control though empowerment: Evidence from nation-building in Soviet Central Asia
Castañeda Dower, Paul, Andrei Markevich, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya. (2023) Draft coming soon.
Using detailed historical data on local insurgency against the Soviet state and intergroup conflict in Central Asia collected using recently declassified arrives of secret Soviet police reports and the historical census data on local group composition, we study the effect of the institution of the Central Asian states by the Bolsheviks in the 1920s. The newly instituted autonomous Soviet Republics gave political power to a particular ethnic group among those residing on their territory. The institution of these Republics substantially reduced the level of insurgency activity against the Soviet power, allowing the center to keep control over the former Russian Empire colonies. It also lowered conflict between local groups. We also show that the territorial division of the Central Asian territory into Republics resembles very closely to an ideal territorial division into states, which maximizes group homogeneity within states, with non-contiguous parts ruled out. We show that the main effect of the reform comes from the areas that comply to the "ideal-division" rule. The results suggest that the Bolsheviks’ indigenization policy helped them keep control of the periphery of the Soviet empire. We also study how this reform affected the nation building in central Asia and show that the nation building policies, and schools in particular, were important for boosting identification with titular national ethnicity.