Benjamin Blumenthal
LightNews LightNews
banner
bnjmnblmnthl.bsky.social
Benjamin Blumenthal
@bnjmnblmnthl.bsky.social
460 followers 210 following 150 posts
now: ETH | next: ECARES (ULB) | PhD PSE | game theory & political economy | accountability, lobbying, etc. | minions enthusiast

site: https://sites.google.com/view/benjaminblumenthal/
Posts Replies Media Videos
bnjmnblmnthl.bsky.social
My paper "Voter Information and Distributive Politics" has been accepted for publication at the AEJ: Micro 🥳 Ungated version here: osf.io/preprints/so...
Voter Information and Distributive Politics Benjamin Blumenthal Abstract Does more information benefit voters? I examine this question in a novel setting of distributive politics and electoral accountability. Homogeneously-informed electorates can benefit from less information through improvements in the control or screening of politicians. For heterogeneously-informed electorates, I show that the distribution of resources and voter welfare is affected by the nature of informational heterogeneity and by voters’ ability to communicate with each other. When communication is impossible, less-informed voters can be better off than more-informed voters.
September 15, 2025 at 4:15 PM
bnjmnblmnthl.bsky.social
excellent point
The more subtle problem, however, is that this is a theory of democracy as the provision of information about what the public thinks, more than it is a theory of democracy as decision making. Pitkin again:
August 6, 2025 at 10:28 AM
bnjmnblmnthl.bsky.social
sounds just like me
bibliography of a paper with multiple Scott citations
May 17, 2025 at 7:31 PM
bnjmnblmnthl.bsky.social
Hilarious to see Macron once again trying to pretend that working conditions for researchers in France have not (further) worsened under his presidency. Europe -- and France in particular -- should get their act together on research rather than launch glossy but empty schemes.
Here in France, research is a priority, innovation is a culture, and science is a boundless horizon. Researchers from around the world, choose France, choose Europe! See you on May 5. → http://choosefrance.fr/forscience
April 18, 2025 at 8:22 PM
bnjmnblmnthl.bsky.social
I've just posted a revised version of "Environmental Policymaking with Political Learning" (osf.io/preprints/so...). Comments welcome! 🤗
Environmental Policymaking with Political Learning Abstract I study environmental policymaking when policy choices signal politicians' policy preferences and policy outcomes provide information about policies' appropriateness. I show that when favourable policy outcomes lead voters to want policy persistence, reelection-seeking politicians seek to appear likely to implement the voters' preferred policy for the future, which need not be their ex-ante preferred one. Political inefficiencies arise whenever the ex-ante preferred policy is sufficiently likely to become unpopular after its implementation and policy learning is valuable enough.
January 31, 2025 at 10:30 AM
bnjmnblmnthl.bsky.social
Boris Johnson blaming the failure of the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit on the *snow* in *Copenhagen* in *December* is, even by his standards, quite something.
When the world stood on the brink of climate apocalypse – I went to the Thorvaldsens Museum to look at the sculptures. When the Copenhagen summit collapsed in acrimony, I just went to bed. In explaining our failure, and my unforgivable apathy, I urge you not to ignore the obvious: the one big thing you would have noticed about Copenhagen that December. It was the weather. Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow - ho - ho on snow, settling even on the green copper turrets of City Hall, made famous by Borgen and other great Danish TV shows. You didn’t need a female detective in a sweater to tell you who killed the climate deal in 2009. It was staring us in the face. When the world stood on the brink of climate apocalypse – I went to the Thorvaldsens Museum to look at the sculptures. When the Copenhagen summit collapsed in acrimony, I just went to bed. In explaining our failure, and my unforgivable apathy, I urge you not to ignore the obvious: the one big thing you would have noticed about Copenhagen that December. It was the weather. Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow - ho - ho on snow, settling even on the green copper turrets of City Hall, made famous by Borgen and other great Danish TV shows. You didn’t need a female detective in a sweater to tell you who killed the climate deal in 2009. It was staring us in the face. Snow whirled in eddies through the tent flaps of the conference marquees. The snowmelt got into the welts of the delegates’ shoes and chilled their toes, and when you looked at their shivering blue - lipped faces you could see that their hearts were not in it. We were holding a summit on global warming in what seemed like a mini - Ice Age. It was absurd. As for me, frankly, I was already politically traumatised by snow, and the awful power of cold weather.
December 18, 2024 at 5:53 PM
bnjmnblmnthl.bsky.social
this interesting quote from an article in the FT on the new regime in Syria meeting with bureaucrats from the previous regime is the opportunity to bring back this nice Robinson and Verdier paper from 2013 on The Political Economy of Clientelism (doi.org/10.1111/sjoe...)
One man introduced himself as the head of the public relations department, which he said included "international co-operation" as well as a division for "festival and events management". Asked what this division did exactly, the civil servant answered, "flags". "There's a department for flags?" Ghazal asked incredulously. "Yes, when foreign dignitaries come, we put up a lot of flags," he said. "We hang them from the poles. It's a big job." Abstract In this paper, we argue that the political-commitment problem provides an explanation for why much income redistribution takes an inefficient form, particularly employment in the public sector. A job is a credible way of redistributing when it provides rents (such as in situations with moral hazard), and employment is optimal ex post. Moreover, a job is selective and reversible, and thus ties the continuation utility of a voter to the political success of a particular politician. We show that the need to make offers of employment incentive-compatible leads to inefficiencies in the supply of public goods. We also show that such inefficient redistribution becomes relatively attractive in situations with high inequality and low productivity. Inefficiency is increased when the stakes from politics are high, when inequality is high, and when money matters less than ideology in politics.
December 11, 2024 at 6:52 PM
bnjmnblmnthl.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1016/j.jp...
Highlights • We consider the multi-task problem of a career-minded policymaker who must decide how to allocate effort to prepare for different contingencies. • We show that the policymaker won’t prepare for any sufficiently rare state, regardless of the social benefits from doing so. • Due to policymaker incentives, the principal can be better off when the probability of an unambiguously bad state increases. • We discuss applications of our results, including an explanation for why policymakers may underprepare for rare disasters.
December 4, 2024 at 1:38 PM
bnjmnblmnthl.bsky.social
I'm on the Econ Job Market this year 🤓

I am an applied economic theorist, with a focus on political economy and information economics.

My JMP, "Environmental Policymaking with Political Learning", is available here: doi.org/10.31235/osf...

#econsky #polisky #econjmp
Environmental Policymaking with Political Learning Abstract: I propose a model of environmental policymaking with electoral accountability in which voters learn about politicians' policy preferences and environmental policies' appropriateness by observing past policy choices and outcomes. Compared to an entrenched benevolent policymaker benchmark, I show that reelection concerns can lead to policy distortions, as a result of the interdependence between voters' learning about policies and their induced preferences over politicians: when favourable policy outcomes lead voters to prefer policy persistence, the desire to appear likely to implement the policy voters will prefer prior to the election can stifle the implementation of the ex-ante optimal environmental policy.
November 22, 2024 at 1:24 PM
bnjmnblmnthl.bsky.social
Trojan horse: a paper about environmental policymaking Inside it: electoral accountability soldiers Me: offering the Trojan horse
November 17, 2024 at 12:53 PM
bnjmnblmnthl.bsky.social
answer is obvious: Fake Ian is the solution
January 11, 2024 at 8:43 AM