research
published papers, working papers, and work in progress
Published papers
2021
- NatMedCOVID-19 Vaccine Acceptance and Hesitancy in Low- and Middle-Income Countrieswith Julio S Solı́s Arce, Shana S Warren, Niccolò F Meriggi, Alexandra Scacco, Nina McMurry, Maarten Voors, Amyn Abdul Malik, Samya Aboutajdine, Opeyemi Adeojo, and 64 othersNature Medicine 2021
Widespread acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines is crucial for achieving sufficient immunization coverage to end the global pandemic, yet few studies have investigated COVID-19 vaccination attitudes in lower-income countries, where large-scale vaccination is just beginning. We analyze COVID-19 vaccine acceptance across 15 survey samples covering 10 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Asia, Africa and South America, Russia (an upper-middle-income country) and the United States, including a total of 44,260 individuals. We find considerably higher willingness to take a COVID-19 vaccine in our LMIC samples (mean 80.3%; median 78%; range 30.1 percentage points) compared with the United States (mean 64.6%) and Russia (mean 30.4%). Vaccine acceptance in LMICs is primarily explained by an interest in personal protection against COVID-19, while concern about side effects is the most common reason for hesitancy. Health workers are the most trusted sources of guidance about COVID-19 vaccines. Evidence from this sample of LMICs suggests that prioritizing vaccine distribution to the Global South should yield high returns in advancing global immunization coverage. Vaccination campaigns should focus on translating the high levels of stated acceptance into actual uptake. Messages highlighting vaccine efficacy and safety, delivered by healthcare workers, could be effective for addressing any remaining hesitancy in the analyzed LMICs.
@article{solis2021covid, title = {COVID-19 Vaccine Acceptance and Hesitancy in Low- and Middle-Income Countries}, author = {Sol{\'\i}s Arce, Julio S and Warren, Shana S and Meriggi, Niccol{\`o} F and Scacco, Alexandra and McMurry, Nina and Voors, Maarten and Syunyaev, Georgiy and Malik, Amyn Abdul and Aboutajdine, Samya and Adeojo, Opeyemi and others, 64}, journal = {Nature Medicine}, volume = {27}, number = {8}, pages = {1385--1394}, year = {2021}, publisher = {Nature Publishing Group}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-021-01454-y}, url = {https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01454-y}, media = {https://nature.altmetric.com/details/109629548}, status = {published} }
2015
- RJEHow (not) to Measure Russian Regional InstitutionsRussian Journal of Economics 2015
The paper explores various measures of institutional quality in Russian regions, and compares those measures to each other. Such analysis leads to the conclusion that Russian regional institutions are essentially multidimensional, and therefore comparisons of Russian regions in terms of their overall institutional quality could be problematic. New institutional indices are derived from Russian enterprise surveys held under the BEEPS project of the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development. Such indices yield a typology of Russian regions in terms of efficacy of regional administrations’ control over economy and bureaucracy in their regions. Dynamics of regional institutional indices is investigated against the backdrop of Russia-wide institutional trends.
@article{baranov2015not, title = {How (not) to Measure Russian Regional Institutions}, author = {Baranov, Alexey and Malkov, Egor and Polishchuk, Leonid and Rochlitz, Michael and Syunyaev, Georgiy}, journal = {Russian Journal of Economics}, volume = {1}, number = {2}, pages = {154--181}, year = {2015}, publisher = {Elsevier}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ruje.2015.11.005}, url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405473915000227}, status = {published} } - PubChoiceRuling Elites’ Rotation and Asset Ownership: Implications for Property Rightswith Leonid PolishchukPublic Choice 2015
We provide a theory and empirical evidence indicating that the rotation of ruling elites in conjunction with elites’ asset ownership could improve property rights protection in non-democracies. The mechanism that upholds property rights is based on elites’ concern about the security of their own asset ownership in the event they lose power. Such incentives provide a solution to the credible commitment problem in maintaining secure property rights when institutional restrictions on expropriation are weak or absent.
@article{polishchuk2015ruling, title = {Ruling Elites' Rotation and Asset Ownership: Implications for Property Rights}, author = {Polishchuk, Leonid and Syunyaev, Georgiy}, journal = {Public Choice}, volume = {162}, number = {1}, pages = {159--182}, year = {2015}, publisher = {Springer}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-014-0210-2}, url = {https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11127-014-0210-2}, status = {published} }
2014
- VoprEkoInvestment Climate and Government Turnover in Russian Regionswith Leonid PolishchukVoprosy Ekonomiki (In Russian) 2014
We study the impact of Russian regional governors’ rotation and their affiliation with private sector firms for the quality of investment climate in Russian regions. A theoretical model presented in the paper predicts that these factors taken together improve “endogenous” property rights under authoritarian regimes. This conclusion is confirmed empirically by using Russian regional data for 2002—2010; early in that period gubernatorial elections had been canceled and replaced by federal government’s appointments. This is an indication that under certain conditions government rotation is beneficial for economic development even when democracy is suppressed.
@article{syunyaev2014climate, title = {Investment Climate and Government Turnover in Russian Regions}, author = {Syunyaev, Georgiy and Polishchuk, Leonid}, journal = {Voprosy Ekonomiki (In Russian)}, number = {2}, pages = {88--117}, year = {2014}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.32609/0042-8736-2014-2-88-117}, url = {https://www.vopreco.ru/jour/article/view/616?locale=en_US}, status = {published} }
Book chapters
- PalgraveProperty Rights without Democracy: The Role of Elites’ Rotation and Asset Ownershipwith Leonid PolishchukIn Dahlström, Carland and Wängnerud, Lena (eds.) Elites, Institutions and the Quality of Government 2015
@inproceedings{polishchuk2015property, title = {Property Rights without Democracy: The Role of Elites' Rotation and Asset Ownership}, author = {Polishchuk, Leonid and Syunyaev, Georgiy}, booktitle = {Elites, Institutions and the Quality of Government}, editor = {Dahlstr{\"o}m, Carland and W{\"a}ngnerud, Lena}, pages = {167--186}, year = {2015}, publisher = {Palgrave Macmillan, London}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137556288_10}, url = {https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137556288_10}, status = {published} }
Working papers
- Federalism and Ideologywith Anna M Wilke, and Michael M TingConditionally Accepted at PSRM
Classic arguments about federalist governance emphasize an informational or learning role for decentralizing policy authority, but in practice, ideological outcomes frequently motivate this choice. We examine the role of ideology in the allocation of policy-making power by modeling a two-period interaction between an elected central executive and two local governments. Decentralization reduces the executive’s ability to set policy and control externalities but potentially insures against future policy reversals. In this environment, partial decentralization is a common outcome. Complete decentralization arises when executives are unlikely to be re-elected, party polarization is high, and institutional hurdles to policy-making are big. These results help to clarify existing cross-national empirical findings on the determinants of centralization.
- Is Propaganda Effective? Evidence on Framing of Responsibility by State-Owned Media in RussiaDraft
Many autocrats make use of state-owned media to shift blame or claim credit for policy outcomes (Guriev and Treisman, 2019). A particularly common strategy is to send messages that target citizens’ perceptions of whether central or local government is responsible for policy outcomes. But how effective is this strategy given that news outlets are known to be under government control? I report results from a survey experiment with over 4,000 respondents in Russia. The experiment randomly assigned respondents to watch news reports from popular Russia’s state-owned TV channel, Rossia-1. The reports emphasize the central government’s monitoring of road maintenance and natural disaster management – two policies that fall under the purview of local government. My findings suggest that even though the reports did not shift beliefs about the locus of policy responsibility, they did improve perceptions of policy performance and increase government support. I show that these patterns are consistent with a model of Bayesian learning in which citizens are already aware of the bias of news outlets and the locus of policy responsibility. The central intuition is that citizens are aware that the central government would only associate itself with local policies if the performance is high. As a result citizens update positively on policy performance and reward the government. The broader implication is that propaganda can be effective not in spite of but because citizens know that news outlets are government controlled, but its population level effects can be limited by selective exposure.
- Learning about Bias: An Experiment on News Consumption in Russiawith Anton ShirikovDraft
Most media that people consume exhibit certain political biases or slants. However, many citizens either do not understand or underestimate the slant of the media they consume. This study proposes a new experimental design to investigate whether making media slant more evident affects how citizens perceive news coverage and update their political beliefs. Our experimental intervention fielded on an online survey platform in Russia exposes respondents to a substantial amount of news coverage by major pro-government and independent television channels and, at the same time, makes respondents more attentive to the slant of news reporting. Our panel design allows us to examine the subsequent impact of the intervention on respondents’ perceptions of media, willingness to consume particular media outlets, and evaluations of the economy and government performance.
- Making, Updating, and Querying Causal Models using CausalQueriesDraft
The R package CausalQueries can be used to make, update, and query causal models defined on binary nodes. Users provide a causal statement of the form "X -> M <- Y; M <-> Y" which is interpreted as a structural causal model over a collection of binary nodes. Then CausalQueries allows users to (1) identify the set of principal strata—causal types—required to characterize all possible causal relations between nodes that are consistent with the causal statement (2) determine a set of parameters sneeded to characterize distributions over these causal types (3) update beliefs over distributions of causal types, using a stan model plus data, and (4) pose a wide range of causal queries of the model, using either the prior distribution, the posterior distribution, or a user-specified candidate vector of parameters.
Work in Progress
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- Meta-Analysis of Hard-to-Reach Population Studieswith Macartan HumphreysData Collection
This project uses meta-analysis tools to study the relative performance of sampling and estimation strategies to measure the prevalence of hard-to-reach populations. Using data from 8 field studies of human trafficking in developing countries, we estimate the relative performance of the most common measurement strategies. These include successive sampling and link-tracing methods based on respondent-driven sampling, network scale-up methods based on time-location, and proportional sampling. Scholars can use the framework we provide for diagnosing their study designs and rolling analysis of the relative performance of measurement strategies.
- The Effects of Internet Access on Political Opinions and BehaviorData Collection
The goal of this project is to study the effects of internet access on a range of social, economic and political outcomes in poor communities in South Africa. The main intervention consists of the installation of WiFi routers with free Internet access in a number of households. The routers enable members of the household (and possibly some of the neighbors) to access the internet for free. Currently, the residents of these communities - even though they often own a device that would allow them to connect to the internet - face prohibitively high costs of internet access due to the costs of airtime. We further propose a cross-cutting treatment that consists of the provision of information on the start page which individuals see whenever they access the internet. The aim of this cross-cutting treatment is to encourage individuals to take advantage of the internet as an informational resource rather than a mere entertainment opportunity. The social, economic and political outcomes of interest to this project will be measured through an in-person survey of the treated and untreated households.