Teresa Esteban Casanelles

Teresa Esteban Casanelles

Research

Working Papers

Is an Image Worth a Thousand Votes? Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Political Advertising

This paper examines the causal effects of electoral campaigns on voting behavior in multi-party democracies, where voters choose among parties differing along multiple dimensions. Using novel geolocated data on street-level ads, I find that an increase in ads significantly increases a party’s vote share. The impact is heterogeneous across party and voter types, being larger for new parties and candidates, and more persuasive for ideologically aligned voters. The analysis supports ad salience and informativeness as the main mechanisms underlying the effect. Finally, results also show spillover effects across parties, with ads benefiting other ideologically similar parties.

Best Applied Paper by a Young Researcher, Econometric Society – European Meeting 2023

Media Coverage: Nada es Gratis

Better the Devil You Don’t Know? Economic Shocks, New Party Emergence, and Changes in Voting Behavior

This paper analyses the effects of an economic shock on the emergence of new parties and other changes in voting parties by using regional variation in the exposure to the shock. I find that a worsening of economic conditions as measured by unemployment rate leads to an increase in electoral competition and volatility. In particular, the deeper the effects of the recession in a area, the larger the number of new parties emerge and become more successful and there is an increase in the changes in vote shares. On the other hand, the vote share of parties previously in government decreases and a decrease in vote share concentration.

Incentives and Strategic Behaviour: An Experiment

with Duarte Gonçalves

How and why do incentive levels affect strategic behaviour? This paper examines an experiment designed to identify the causal effect of scaling up incentives on choices, beliefs, and response times in dominance-solvable games. Higher incentives increase action sophistication and decrease mistake propensity, while beliefs become more accurate, and response times longer. We provide evidence that higher incentives increase cognitive effort, as proxied by longer response times, which in turn is associated with improved performance and predicts choice sophistication and belief accuracy. Overall, the data lend support to both payoff-dependent mistakes and costly reasoning models.

Work in progrss