Using a randomized experiment in the context of the 2019 European elections in France, we study how fact-checking affects real sharing of “alternative facts” (false or misleading statements by politicians) on Facebook and the determinants of the decision to view the fact-checking. We expose...

Henry, Zhuravskaya, and Guriev (2022) examine whether people are willing to share "alternative facts" espoused by right-wing populist parties before the 2019 European elections in France and how this interacted with the availability of fact-checking information. They find that both imposed and...

How effective is fact checking in countervailing "alternative facts,'' i.e., misleading statements by politicians? In a randomized online experiment during the 2017 French presidential election campaign, we subjected subgroups of 2480 French voters to alternative facts by the extreme-right...

How do radical reforms of the state shape economic development over time? In 1790, France’s first Constituent Assembly overhauled the kingdom’s organization to set up new administrative entities and local capitals. In a subset of departments, new capitals were chosen quasi-randomly as the...