Arianna Ornaghi (Hertie School in Berlin) 21.3.2024

It is our pleasure that Dr. Arianna Ornaghi (Hertie School in Berlin) will present on Thursday, March 21, 2024, at 12:45 in room RB437 about the topic “The Returns to Viral Media: The Case of US Campaign Contributions.”

Registration is not required and anyone who would like to attend is warmly invited.

It is also possible to participate online via MS Teams. To get access, please, contact lubomir.cingl@vse.cz.

ABSTRACT: Social media has changed the structure of mass communication. In this paper, we explore its role in influencing political donations. Using a daily dataset of campaign contributions and Twitter activity for US Members of Congress 2019-2020, we find that attention on Twitter (as measured by likes) is positively correlated with the amount of daily small donations received. However, this is not true for everybody: the impact on campaign donations is highly skewed, indicating very concentrated returns to attention that are in line with a ‘winner-takes-all’ market. Our results are confirmed in a geography-based causal design linking member’s donations across states.

BIO: Arianna Ornaghi is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Hertie School. Arianna is an applied microeconomist who specialises in empirical political economy. Before joining the Hertie School, Arianna was a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Warwick. She earned a PhD in Economics from MIT in 2017 and holds BSc and MSc degrees in Economics and Social Sciences from Bocconi University.