CAGE Video / Essay writing Competition 2024

Please note: the deadline for entries has now been extended to Sunday 24 March.

Competition now open

A key part of CAGE’s mission is to put economics research to work in shaping debate, informing decision-making, and changing minds. We are always working to make our research more accessible and to reach as many people as we can. And we are asking for your help!

This year CAGE is inviting Warwick Economics undergraduates and MSc students to help us with this task by either creating a 3-minute video OR writing a 1500 word essay that communicates the findings and policy relevance of one of our research papers in a compelling, accurate and interesting way.

There will be a prize of £500 for the winning video and a prize of £500 for the winning essay.

Interested? Take a look at the competition brief below.

The deadline for submission is Sunday 24 March

To submit your video or essay, please contact cage.centre@warwick.ac.uk and share your video using Files.Warwick.

The winning video will be published on the CAGE YouTube account and promoted on our website. (Please note that owing to academic research publication restrictions, on occasion videos may not be able to be published immediately).

The winning essay will be published in Advantage magazine, our bi-annual magazine (print and online) featuring policy-focused articles circulated to academics, policymakers and journalists.

The brief

Create a video or write an essay based on one of these five research papers:-

• Can Crises Affect Citizen Activism? Evidence from a Pandemic (Farzana Afridi, Ahana Basistha, Amrita Dhillon, Danila Serra)
• Losing on the Home Front? Battlefield Casualties, Media, and Public Support for Foreign Interventions (Thiemo Fetzer, Pedro CL Souza, Oliver Vanden Eynde, Austin L. Wright)
• From the Death of God to the Rise of Hitler (Sascha O. Becker, Hans-Joachim Voth)
• The Returns to Viral Media: The Case of US Campaign Contributions (Johannes Böken, Mirko Draca, Nicola Mastrorocco, Arianna Ornaghi)
• Electoral Importance and the News Market: Novel Data and Quasi-Experimental Evidence from India (Julia Cagé, Guilhem Cassan, Francesca R. Jensenius)

Video Criteria:

• Videos should be no more than 3 minutes long They should be animated (be as creative as you like) with subtitles.
• Voiceover is optional. No actors or ‘talking heads’ please.
• Target your content at a general audience: keep your message clear and simple, focus on two or three findings and draw out a clear conclusion.
• You can use graphs and images from the research paper (you may recolour these if you’d like). Make sure they are easy for non-experts to read and understand.
• Please do not use music or images that you do not have the rights to.
• Please ensure that you credit the title and authors of the research at the start of the film.
• You must include a slide at the start of your video with the words ‘CAGE Video Competition 2024’ and your name.

Essay Criteria:

• Essays should be around 1,500 words and should be written for a non-academic policy-engaged audience.

Examples

Need some inspiration? Here are three examples of videos produced by a former video competition winner:-

Telling a complex story in 3 minutes (EconFilms) The art of the trade war

Using simple imagery to make a big impact (Econimate) Did austerity cause Brexit?

Creating a great video with basic tools (Sameera Bhalotra-Bowers) Clean water, a dirty matter

Here are some examples of how our working papers are successfully written up in our Advantage magazine:- Advantage Magazine issues