FES International Research Seminar with Associate Professor Quoc-Anh Do, Sciences Po (Institute of Political Studies), France

The next speaker at the FES International Research Seminar Series was Associate Professor Quoc-Anh Do, Sciences Po (Institute of Political Studies).

Quoc-Anh Do is an Associate Professor of Economics at Sciences Po (Institute of Political Studies) in Paris, and a Research Affiliate of CEPR. Quoc-Anh's research interests span over several applied micro topics, especially political economics, economics of social networks, development economics, economic history, and corporate governance. His publications appeared in many top journals including AER, QJE, JEEA and AEJ: Applied.
At the FES International Research Seminar professor presented joint research "Friendship Networks and Political Opinions: A Natural Experiment among Future French Politicians" (with Yann Algan, Nicolo Dalvit, Alexis Le Chapelain and Yves Zenou).

Abstract: We study how friendship shapes students’ political opinions in a natural experiment. We use the indicator whether two students were exogenously assigned to a short-term “integration group”, unrelated to scholar activities and dissolved before the school year, as instrumental variable for their friendship, to estimate the effect of friendship on pairwise political opinion outcomes in dyadic regressions. After six months, friendship causes a reduction of differences in opinions by one quarter of the mean difference. It likely works through a homophily-enforced mechanism, by which friendship causes politically-similar students to join political associations together, which reinforces their political similarity. The effect is strong among initially similar pairs, but absent in dissimilar pairs. Friendship affects opinion gaps by reducing divergence, therefore polarization and extremism, without forcing individuals’ views to converge. Network characteristics also matter to the friendship effect.

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The FES International Research Seminar organisers are: Alexander Tarasov (Ph.D, Associate Professor, Head of Department of theoretical economics FES HSE) and Levent Celik (Ph.D, Associate Professor, Department of theoretical economics FES HSE)