Working Papers

How do authoritarian regimes strengthen global support for nondemocratic political systems? Roughly half of the users of the social media platform TikTok report getting news from social media influencers. Against this backdrop, authoritarian regimes have increasingly outsourced content creation to these influencers. To gain understanding of the extent of this phenomenon and the persuasive capabilities of these influencers, we collect comprehensive data on pro-China influencers on TikTok. We show that pro-China influencers have more engagement than state media. We then create a realistic clone of the TikTok app, and conduct a randomized experiment in which over 8,500 Americans are recruited to use this app and view a random sample of actual TikTok content. We show that pro-China foreign influencers are strikingly effective at increasing favorability toward China, while traditional Chinese state media causes backlash. The findings highlight the importance of influencers in shaping global public opinion.

Political economists have long speculated about the effects of connections between bureaucracies and the private sector. However, data tracing flows of civil servants from the bureaucracy to the private sector remains rare. This article presents a new dataset, Amakudata, which contains individual-level data of virtually all Japanese bureaucrats retiring into positions outside of the bureaucracy from 2009 to 2019. We first present how the dataset was created and validated. Next, we describe what the data reveals about the revolving door in Japan and beyond, and show that some sectors may be larger hirers of government personnel than previously thought. We conclude by discussing how the data can be used to investigate empirical and causal questions in diverse subjects such as corruption and regulatory capture; procurement, pork, and government waste; bureaucratic representation; and international trade and investment.

When national governments fail, local governments, citizens, and civil society actors can co-produce public goods and address pressing problems like the climate crisis. We evaluate a co-produced waste management program administered by a local government and social enterprise in Lebanon. The program teaches citizens how to correctly sort while monitoring their sorting quality. Two months post-intervention, the program increased sorting quality by 0.24 stars out of 5, and by 2.4 stars for those who continued to opt in to the program. Treated households were three times as likely to enter a 'green' raffle, demonstrating impact on other environmentally-conscious behaviors. However, effects on sorting quality disappear after the program ceases one year later, and treated households are less likely to volunteer for other environmental initiatives. The results highlight the promise of co-production models — but also the importance of ongoing monitoring to unlock durable results and avoid civic fatigue.

Offshore wealth is estimated to equal 10% of global GDP. To reclaim these funds for domestic taxation, policymakers have adopted tax transparency reforms to pressure corporations engaged in tax avoidance. We analyze the impact of the EU's Directive on Public Country-by-Country Reporting, which mandates that large multinational corporations disclose corporate tax payment data starting in 2026. Employing difference in differences designs, we find evidence that reputation-sensitive firms headquartered in the EU are increasing their effective tax rates in anticipation of the public reveal of their data. In contrast, we find that corporations exempt from the Directive, specifically banks, are decreasing their tax rates by more than 8 percentage points. We observe weaker effects for consumer-facing banks, suggesting that banks continue to hedge against the risk of public shaming. Collectively, our results imply that tax transparency initiatives can have both intended and unintended consequences.

Sexual harassment remains prevalent in the workplace. Yet despite abundant research on its prevalence, we know little about worker demand for systems to report and/or mitigate harassment. We present results from a conjoint experimental study of a large-scale sample of the Japanese public, in which we estimate how much salary and benefits workers are willing to trade for best-in-practice harassment protections. We find that women are 6 percentage points more likely to prefer firms with anonymous, third-party harassment reporting systems compared to other firms, and they also negatively value workplaces with no sexual harassment reporting mechanism equivalently to a workplace with a 20% lower wage. Men also negatively value poor sexual harassment reporting mechanisms, but they are more willing to trade wages for better workplace bullying ("power harassment") reporting systems. These findings suggest that workers are willing to pay for harassment reporting systems, and that companies may better attract talent by adopting these reporting schemes.

In recent years, established democracies and ascendant autocracies have competed for the hearts and minds of citizens across the globe. In this article, we develop a novel theory of soft power effectiveness centered on the relations between soft power senders and receivers. We argue that when relations with soft power senders remain depoliticized in receivers' domestic politics, soft power promotion fares well. When the relations are politicized, however, it risks backfiring. To test our theory, we conduct a multi-country experiment in East Asia that examines the effect of real-world Chinese and Japanese soft power promotion efforts. The experimental results lend credence to our theory. Where relations are depoliticized, soft power promotion efforts strengthen support for bilateral cooperation, and where relations are politicized, the same soft power treatments cause backlash. Our findings highlight that autocracies can effectively project soft power insofar as they retain good ties with their soft power recipients.