BICEPS/SSE Riga Research Seminar: Education, Fake News and the Political Budget Cycle

We are happy to invite you to a BICEPS/SSE Riga research seminar, which will take place on Thursday, May 25, at 17:00 at SSE Riga, room 507.

We are delighted to welcome Fabio Padovano as the speaker. Fabio Padovano is Professor at the University of Rennes 1 and Professor at the University of Roma III. He has been Visiting Professor at the University of Western Ontario, University of Maryland, George Mason University, University of Fribourg and London School of Economics and Political Science. Fabio Padovano has published in journals such as Public Choice, European Journal of Political Economy, Economics of Governance, Economic Inquiry, Energy Economics, Kyklos and Constitutional Political Economy. His current research interests are in the fields of public choice, political economy, local public finance, law and economics, environmental economics, economics of religion and economics of the arts.

 Title: Education, Fake News and the Political Budget Cycle

Time: Thursday, May 25, 17:00

Venue: SSE Riga, room 507

Abstract

This paper empirically verifies whether education, an indicator of voters’ ability to process information, constrains political budget cycles (PBC), a measure of inefficiency in the agency relationship between voters and their representatives. Over information and the spread of fake news question the previous results of conditional PBC literature on information as a factor improving such relationship. We proxy the quality of education by PISA scores and the its diffusion by the percentage of students completing secondary and tertiary education. On a sample of 46 countries over the period 2000-2019, the estimates show that higher levels of education reduce the magnitude of PBC. Adding standard proxies for information (media and internet penetration) does not affect the results, showing that education matters more than information. The analysis also shows that higher degrees of democracy reduce the education levels needed to control PBC. All the other findings of the literature appear confirmed.