CAGE Essay Competition Winners

Winners announced!

The results of the extremely competitive CAGE Spring 2019 essay competition are announced.
The essays were all based upon one of the hundred or so CAGE working papers of the students’ choosing, published during 2017 and 2018. The entries were judged by several senior academics at Warwick and an external writer and media consultant on economic findings, policy analysis and commentary.

And the winner is:

Ashok Manandhar, for his essay on “Gravity and Migration before Railways: Evidence from Parisian Prostitutes and Revolutionaries”.

Urban centres offer opportunities for work, social advancement, and higher living standards for both the most ambitious and the neediest. This force of attraction was pivotal for the development of Paris between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, given that the death rate in France’s capital and most populous city exceeded the birth rate. Instead, it was mainly internal rural-urban migration that drove population growth and urbanisation during this period, meaning by the 1790s as low as 30 percent of Parisians were native-born. Read more…

The two runners-up are:

Umesh Moramudali, for his essay on “Fanning the flames of hate: Social media and hate crime”.

Over the last few years, as the number of social media users rise, influence of social media on society has significantly increased. This increase has inevitably resulted in good as well as bad. In the recent past, number of governments across the globe claimed that social media has had significant influence on hate crimes due to hate speech on social media platforms. On that backdrop, Karsten Müller and Carlo Schwarz in 2018 carried out a research titled “Fanning the Flames of Hate: Social Media and Hate Crime” to examine the impact of social media on hate crime in Germany using Facebook data. Read more…

Daniel Reti, for his essay on “Politics in the Facebook Era”.

Social media has created a new era of advertising. Facebook, Google and Twitter’s technology offers far more precise behavioural micro-targeting than the traditional media outlets. It gives politicians a new and more sophisticated channel to reach voters. With these, politicians are able to personalize their campaign by specifically targeting their audience by criteria such as age, gender, geographical location or political ideology. However, in contrast to traditional channels, Facebook’s market for advertising is completely deregulated. This raises serious questions about how it affects elections, and changes campaign advertising conventions. We assess the effects of such micro-targeting by exploiting the variation of daily Facebook ad prices during the 2016 presidential election, and then we match the results to see if they correspond with voter turnout. Read more…

Congratulations to all three of our winners!

The ESRC Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) is an integral part of Warwick's Department of Economics. CAGE publishes around 40 to 50 working papers per year.