We argue that the scholarship on digital media and its effects need to consider how individuals process digital information and not only on what they are exposed to. We highlight that digital media maintains attributes of more traditional media that qualifies its expected political impact. In News Quality in the Digital Age, edited by Regina Lawrence and Philip Napoli. New York: Routledge.
Why has there not been more compensation for the losers of free trade? I make the novel argument that there has been a failure of compensation because political elites have tacitly colluded to avoid compensation. With the help of a simple formal model, I contend that political parties are better off implicitly agreeing to not increase compensation and instead compete over less costly issues. To evaluate the implication that import competition should cause less compensation as tacit collusion becomes more likely, I develop a two-part identification strategy. Firstly, I construct original shift-share instruments to estimate the effect of import competition on a measure of compensation. Secondly, I assess if this effect is moderated by how feasible tacit collusion is, which I estimate using latent variable analysis. For 24 European countries from 2000-2022, I show that a negative import shock causes less compensation on average as tacit collusion becomes more feasible.
A lack of consensus on how to measure compensation to the losers of free trade has made it difficult to learn from studies that evaluate how well compensation has “worked.” I clarify what we can learn from studies involving measures of compensation by comparing each to the theoretical concept and also to the estimated losses from free trade generated from quantitative trade models.