1
JULIA CAG
http://scholar.harvard.edu/cage
cage@fas.harvard.edu
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Placement Director: Gita Gopinath gopinath@harvard.edu 617-495-8161
Placement Director: Nathan Nunn nunn@fas.harvard.edu 617-496-4958
Graduate Administrator: Brenda Piquet bpiquet@fas.harvard.edu 617-495-8927
Office Contact Information:
Littauer Center G27
1805 Cambridge Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Personal Information:
Date of birth: February 17, 1984
Citizenship: France
Undergraduate Studies:
Ecole Normale Suprieure Ulm, Major in Economics, Paris, 2005-2009
M.A. in Economics, Paris School of Economics, with highest honours, 2006-2008
B.A. in Econometrics, University Paris-I Panthon-Sorbonne, with highest honours, 2005-2006
Graduate Studies:
Harvard University, 2010 to present
Thesis Title: Essays on the Political Economy of Information
Expected Completion Date: June 2014
References:
Professor Nathan Nunn Professor Richard Hornbeck
Littauer Center M29 Littauer Center 232
617-496-4958, nnunn@fas.harvard.edu
Professor Andrei Shleifer
Littauer Center M10
617-495-5046, ashleifer@harvard.edu
202-494-0722, hornbeck@fas.harvard.edu
Professor Alberto Alesina
Littauer Center 210
617-495-8388, aalesina@harvard.edu
Teaching and Research Fields:
Primary fields: Political Economy, Economic History
Secondary fields: International Trade, Development Economics, Industrial Organization
Teaching Experience:
Spring 2014
Fall 2013
Fall 2012
Spring 2010
Aid, Debt and International Finance (graduate), Paris School of Economics (lecturer)
Economics of the Media (graduate), CELSA (lecturer)
Development Economics (graduate), Telecom ParisTech (lecturer)
Political Economy (graduate), Sciences Po (teaching fellow)
Summer 2009
Fall 2009
Political Economy of Development, Advanced Graduate Workshop on Poverty,
Development and Globalization, Manchester (teaching fellow)
Macroeconomics (graduate), Paris School of Economics (teaching fellow)
Spring 2009 Macroeconomics (undergraduate), Harvard (teaching fellow)
Fall 2008 Distribution and Development (undergraduate), Harvard (teaching fellow)
2
Research Experience and Other Employment:
2013
2008-2009
European Commission (EuropeAid), Junior Expert
World Bank, Consultant
2008-2009 French Agency for Development, Consultant
2007 French Ministry for the Foreign Affairs, Centre of Analysis and Forecast, Intern
2006-2007 OECD Development Centre, Research Assistant
Professional Activities:
Refereeing: Economics of Transition; International Journal of Industrial Organization; Journal of
International Trade and Economic Development; Journal of Public Economics; Quarterly Journal of
Economics; Review of Economics and Statistics.
Academic Visits:
Fall 2009: Oxford University, Oxford Centre for the Analysis of Resource Rich Economies, Visiting
research fellow.
Invited Seminars and Conferences:
2013: Big Data for Media Analysis (Paris)
2013: Fifth Tokyo International Conference on African Development (Yokohama).
2012: NYU, Department of Politics; IPD African Task Force (Columbia University).
2011: Foro de Biarritz (Santo Domingo); CAP/IDEAS (Madrid).
2010: World Bank Workshop on Economic Growth.
2009: Oxford University; Foro de Biarritz (Quito); African Task Force (Pretoria); French Agency for
Economic Development.
Other Seminars and Conferences:
2013: TILEC Workshop; Working Group in African Political Economy (WGAPE); Harvard Economic
History Tea; Harvard Industrial Organization Lunch; Harvard Research Workshop in Political Economy;
Harvard Macro Lunch; MIT Political Economy Breakfast; Harvard Development Lunch; Harvard
Organizational Economics Lunch; PSE Applied Economics Lunch Seminar.
2012: Harvard Macro Lunch; MIT Political Economy Breakfast; Harvard Economic History Tea; Harvard
Industrial Organization Lunch.
2011: Media Economics Workshop (Moscow); IEA (Beijing); Harvard International Lunch; Harvard
Development Lunch.
2010: PSE Applied Economics Lunch.
2009: AFSE Congress (Paris); EEA-ESEM Congress (Barcelona); PET (Galway); PSE Applied Economics
Lunch; North American Meeting of the Econometric Society (Boston); MIT Political Economy Breakfast;
Harvard Research Workshop in Political Economy; Harvard Labor-Public Finance Lunch.
2008: Advanced Graduate Workshop on Poverty, Development and Globalization (Manchester); PSE
Macroeconomic Tea Break.
Honors, Scholarships, and Fellowships:
2013-2014
2013
2012-2013
Roger L. Martin Cornerstone Graduate Student Fellowship Fund, Harvard
NET Institute research grant
Center for European Studies (Harvard University) Krupp Foundation Graduate
Dissertation Research Fellowship
2011 & 2012 Warbung Funds research grant, Department of Economics, Harvard University
2011-present
2010-2013
LEAP research grant, Department of Economics, Harvard University
CEPREMAP research grant
2010 & 2012 Paris School of Economics research grant
2010-present Harvard Grant
2008-2009 Herchel-Smith ENS-Harvard exchange fellowship
3
Research Papers:
Media Competition, Information Provision and Political Participation [Job Market Paper]
This paper investigates the impact of increased media competition on the quantity and quality of news
provided and, ultimately, changes in political participation. Drawing from the literature on vertical product
differentiation to model the production choices of newspapers, I show how an increase in the number of
newspapers can decrease both the quantity and quality of information provided. I build a new county-level
panel dataset of local newspaper presence and political turnout in France, from 1945 to 2012. I estimate the
effect of newspaper entry by comparing counties that experience entry to similar counties in the same years
that do not. These counties exhibit similar trends prior to newspaper entry, but newspaper entry then leads to
substantial declines in the total number of journalists. More newspapers are also associated with fewer news
articles and lower information provision. These effects are concentrated in counties with homogeneous
populations, as predicted by the model, with little impact on counties with heterogeneous populations.
Newspaper entry, and the associated decline in information provision, is ultimately found to decrease voter
turnout.
Improving National Brands: Reputation for Quality and Export Promotion Policies (with Dorothe
Rouzet)
R&R at the Journal of International Economics.
Why do made in labels matter? We study 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 depends
on both past experience with the good and the country of origin's reputation for quality. Asymmetric
information acts as a barrier to entry for high-quality firms but facilitates sales by fly-by-night low-quality
firms. We derive two types of steady-state equilibria with endogenous reputation. In a high-quality
equilibrium, imperfect information does not hinder entry into export markets, but there is a distortion in profits
and in the quality composition of exports. In a low-quality equilibrium, we obtain a sorting of firms into
exporting that is non-linear in quality. A range of relatively high-quality firms are permanently kept out of the
market by the informational friction, so that countries with bad quality reputation can be locked into exporting
low-quality, low-cost goods. Export subsidies then have a positive welfare effect on the exporting country, by
improving the average quality of its exports and its terms of trade. However, a subsidy has the opposite long-
run effects in a country that initially exports relatively high-quality products. The model is consistent with
empirical patterns of export prices. Measuring national reputations by analyzing the content of US newspaper
articles about foreign countries over 1988-2006, we find that more positive news coverage of foreign countries
and companies is associated with higher unit values of their exports to the US, particularly in sectors with a
larger scope for vertical differentiation.
The Long-Term Effects of the Printing Press in sub-Saharan Africa (with Valeria Rueda) (submitted)
This article examines the long-term consequences of the introduction of the printing press in the 19th century
on newspaper readership and other civic attitudes in sub-Saharan Africa. In sub-Saharan Africa, Protestant
missionaries were the first both to import the printing press technology and to allow the indigenous population
to use it. We build a new geocoded dataset locating Protestant missions in 1903. This dataset includes, for
each mission station, the geographic location and its characteristics, as well as the educational and health
related investments undertaken by the mission. We show that proximity to a historical missionary settlement
endowed with a printing press significantly increases newspaper readership today within regions located close
to historical mission settlements. We also find a positive impact on political participation at the community
level. Results are robust to a variety of identification strategies that attempt to address the potential
endogenous selection of missions into printing and externalities on education and literacy.
4
Tax Revenues, Development, and the Fiscal Cost of Trade Liberalization, 1792-2006 (with Lucie
Gadenne) (submitted)
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 larger and longer-lived decreases in total tax revenues in developing countries since the 1970s
than in rich countries in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The fall in total tax revenues lasts more than ten
years in half the developing countries in our sample.
Asymmetric Information, Rent Extraction and Aid Efficiency (2009)
Official Development Aid flows are volatile, non-predictable and not delivered in a transparent way. All these
features reinforce asymmetric information between the citizens and the recipient government about the amount
of aid flows received by developing countries. This article uses a political economy model of rent extraction to
show how this asymmetry (i) encourages rent extraction by kleptocratic regimes, thus reducing aid efficiency,
and (ii) increases the negative impact of aid volatility. It identifies a new channel - the "asymmetric
information" channel - through which aid volatility is costly for recipient countries. The empirical relevance of
the model is confirmed on a panel data of developing countries. Using various specifications and econometric
methods, and developing new yearly estimates of aid volatility, I show that (i) introducing more information
increases aid efficiency, that (ii) the negative impact of aid volatility on aid efficiency vanishes once one
controls for information, and that (iii) this positive impact of information does not come from the fact that
more transparent countries tend to have better institutions.
Research in Progress
Price Discrimination in Two-Sided Markets: Theory and Evidence from the Newspaper Industry (with
Charles Angelucci and Romain De Nijs).
In Preparation
The Economics of the African Media in preparation for the Handbook of Africa and Economics (Oxford
University Press).
