Charles Angelucci

We develop a framework to examine the organizational challenges faced by central rulers whose large territories require delegating administrative power to distant rural or urban elites. These elites have distinct policy preferences and vary in their economic importance. The ruler’s organizational choices balance a trade-off: allowing elites to adapt to local and common shocks while maintaining coordination across the realm. We show that as urban economic potential grows, the ruler transfers administrative control over towns from landed to urban elites, particularly when all players’ preferences are aligned. When towns are administratively autonomous, the ruler summons them to central assemblies to ensure effective communication and coordination. This mechanism can explain how, during the Commercial Revolution, European merchant elites gained nationwide political clout in parliament by first obtaining control over urban administrations. We provide empirical evidence for our core mechanisms and discuss how the model applies to other historical dynamics (ancient Rome and Spanish America), as well as to contemporary organizational problems.

This paper develops a model of news discernment to explore the influence of elections on the formation of partisan-driven parallel information universes. Using survey data from news quizzes administered during and outside the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the model shows that partisan congruence’s impact on news discernment is substantially amplified during election periods. Outside an election, when faced with a true and a fake news story and asked to select the most likely true story, an individual is 4% more likely to choose the true story if it favors their party; in the days prior to the election, this increases to 11%.

We model the relationship between the number of tasks assigned to an employee and a firm’s ability to motivate effort through informal performance-based bonuses. We show that assigning multiple tasks gives the firm a greater range of performance levels that can be rewarded. The firm takes advantage of this by designing equally motivating, flatter, and hence more credible incentives.

We measure Covid-19 knowledge at the onset of the pandemic. Information acquisition models predict that the precision of information increases in the benefits of improved decision-making and decreases in the costs of acquiring information. Indeed, we find that individuals with lower information costs are more informed, and that the benefits of information (proxied by mortality risk) predict information acquisition. High-risk individuals’ knowledge is initially lower, but converges, albeit slowly, to that of low-risk individuals within 43 days. These findings highlight the importance of information cost heterogeneity and suggest a role for policies that increase information access for high-cost, high-benefit groups.

We study self-reporting schemes in the context of employee wrongdoing. We model the interaction between a regulator and a continuum of firms, where each firm has one employer and one employee. Within the scope of their employment, employees can take an action beneficial to themselves but harmful to their employer and society. Employers design employment contracts that either prevent the harmful act or tolerate it. We investigate whether corporate and individual sanctions should be reduced when employees confess to having committed the harmful act. In an extension, we let employers monitor their employees, and investigate whether corporate and individual sanctions should be reduced when employers disclose incriminating evidence. We use the resulting insights to discuss policy implications.

I investigate the optimal way of organizing and motivating the production of information by a team of agents. I compare two modes of production. In the “team outputs” setting, agents produce public information jointly and their individual contributions are indistinguishable. In the “individual outputs” setting, each agent produces her own public information. Directing agents to produce information jointly is commonly observed. Yet, agency theory stresses the difficulties associated with providing incentives based on team outputs and emphasizes the superiority of individual performance measures. This paper provides one reason why the joint production of information is common in practice, which does not rely on ad hoc technological advantages.

To investigate general patterns in news information in the United States, we combine a protocol for identifying major political news stories, 11 monthly surveys with 15,000 participants, and a model of news discernment. When confronted with a true and a fake news story, 47 percent of subjects confidently choose the true story, 3 percent confidently choose the fake story, and the remaining half are uncertain. Socioeconomic differences are associated with large variations in the probability of selecting the true news story. Partisan congruence between an individual and a news story matters, but its impact is up to an order of magnitude smaller.

Technological innovations like broadcast television and the internet challenge local newspapers’ business model of bundling their local content with third-party content, such as wire national news. We examine how the entry of television affected newspapers and news diets in the United States. We construct a dataset of newspapers’ economic performance and content choices from 1944 to 1964 and exploit quasi-random variation in the rollout of television to show its negative impact in the readership and advertising markets. Newspapers responded by reducing content, particularly local news. We tie this change to increased party vote share congruence between congressional and presidential elections.

We study the emergence of urban self-governance in the late medieval period. We focus on England after the Norman Conquest of 1066, building a novel comprehensive dataset of 554 medieval towns. During the Commercial Revolution (twelfth to thirteenth centuries), many merchant towns obtained Farm Grants: the right of self-governed tax collection and law enforcement. Self-governance, in turn, was a stepping stone for parliamentary representation: Farm Grant towns were much more likely to be summoned directly to the medieval English Parliament than otherwise similar towns. We also show that self-governed towns strengthened the role of Parliament and shaped national institutions over the subsequent centuries.

When offering incentive schemes to low-ranking officials, a tension exists between the dual goals of enforcing regulations and preventing corruption. Recent efforts to curb abuses have inspired government interest in using new communication technologies to collect information directly from citizens. We propose a model where a corruptible official is tasked with recommending the government to grant or deny the permit an entrepreneur needs to undertake production. The government tolerates corruption when it does not communicate directly with the entrepreneur. A simple scheme whereby the entrepreneur can report her own noncompliance to the government deters corruption and improves regulatory enforcement.

We model the consequences on newspapers’ content and prices of a reduction in advertising revenues. Newspapers choose the size of their newsroom, and readers are heterogeneous in their ideal amount of journalistic-intensive content. We show that a reduction in advertising revenues lowers newspapers’ incentives to produce journalistic-intensive content. We also build a unique dataset on French newspapers between 1960 and 1974 and perform a difference-in-differences analysis exploiting the introduction of advertising on television, which affected national newspapers more severely than local ones. We find robust evidence of a decrease in the amount of journalistic-intensive content produced and the subscription price.

We analyze collaborative experimentation across multiple independent domains. Each domain contains infinitely many potential projects with asymmetric benefits. In each period and in each domain, two players can idle, jointly explore a new project, or jointly exploit a known one, with voluntary transfers. For intermediate discount factors, treating domains as independent during experimentation is suboptimal. The optimal experimentation policy exhibits common features of collaborative experimentation: lengthy exploration, temporary project exploitation, recall of past projects, and inefficient initial or terminal idling within certain domains. We connect these findings to research on buyer-supplier dynamics and persistent productivity differences.