Title: Targeted Advertising in Elections

Abstract:

Some elections seem unwinnable for challengers because pivotal voters prefer policies on the opposite sides of the status quo. In this paper, I argue that the challenger can win any such election with positive probability if he uses targeted advertising with verifiable messages. In private ads, the challenger makes each voter believe that his policy is a sufficient improvement over the status quo and wins the election when his policy is sufficiently moderate. Furthermore, his odds of winning increase when voters become more extreme, because more extreme voters are more dissatisfied by the status quo and can therefore be persuaded by a wider range of policies.

Title: If You’re NOT So Smart, Why Are You Rich? Robust Market Selection with General Recursive Preferences, with Jaden Yang Chen (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA)

Title: Self-employment within the firm

Abstract: We collect time-use data for entrepreneurs and their workers in over 1,000manufacturing firms in urban Uganda. We document limited labor special-ization within the firm for establishments of all sizes and argue that this islikely due to the prevalence of product customization. We then develop a gen-eral equilibrium model of task assignment within the firm, estimate it withour data, and find large barriers to labor specialization. This setting is close,in terms of aggregate productivity and firm scale, to an extreme benchmarkin which each firm is just a collection of self-employed individuals sharing aproduction space. Given how firms are organized internally, the benefits fromalleviating other frictions that constrain firm growth are muted: most Africanfirms resemble artisanal workshops whose business model is not easily scalable