Explore the vast range of titles available.

The present research investigates whether employees felt more alienated from their work during the COVID-19 pandemic than before it, and examines the causes and consequences of this increase in work alienation. To do so, two longitudinal studies using data collected before (T1; October 2019 [Study 1] and November 2019 [Study 2]) and during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic (T2; May 2020 [Studies 1 and 2]) were conducted (i.e., repeated measures). Data of both studies were analyzed using unobserved effects panel data models. Results of Study 1 ( N  = 197) indicated that employees reported higher levels of work alienation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Going one step further, results of Study 2 ( N  = 295) showed that this higher feeling of work alienation may be explained by an increase in professional isolation and a decrease in meaningfulness of work induced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Results also demonstrated that this increase in work alienation negatively affected employees’ job satisfaction, affective commitment, and turnover intentions. Findings are discussed and practical implications for managers are identified.

This paper studies the relationship between the size of a jurisdiction and how corrupt its citizens perceive officials to be. The relationship may a priori be driven by four distinct mechanisms: (i) larger communities have more officials, thereby making it more likely at least one official is corrupt; (ii) larger communities have a larger budget, thereby offering more opportunity for corruption; (iii) monitoring officials is costlier in larger communities; and (iv) the public is less likely to have contact with officials in larger communities, which raises citizens’ suspicion. First, using cross-country analysis, we establish that people perceive more corruption in countries with larger populations. We then test this stylized fact using French survey data on the perception of municipal government corruption. We again observe that the perception of corruption increases with population size. This result is robust to a series of checks and many confounding factors. Moreover, our results hold across two distinct periods and for another administrative unit, departments. Finally, we report suggestive evidence that the stylized fact is driven by mechanisms (i) and (ii), but not by (iii) and (iv).

We study the causal effect of literary awards on book sales, using France's most prestigious prize, the Goncourt. For this, we implement a regression discontinuity design, taking advantage of the fact that a committee of experts gives the prize to the book receiving the most votes. We observe that the Goncourt increases sales by 350 percent and that this effect is larger for books that sold fewer copies before the award. Additional results show that the prize results in more reviews on Amazon but increases the probability that they are negative. Finally, we report that the effect on sales is partly driven by an increase in word of mouth. These findings are consistent with a model where the Goncourt provides information on the existence of a book and where consumers use the prize as a quality signal and a coordination device but, as a result, read books that are too far from their tastes. This interpretation is backed by the finding that, despite its positive effect on sales, the Goncourt des Lycéens, a prize based on the same list of books as the Goncourt but awarded by a group of high-school students whose tastes are arguably doser to the public's than to those of experts, has no effect on the sentiment of reviews.

We study how demonstrating against a far-right candidate changes the behavior of voters and ultimately impacts election results. To do so, we focus on the 2002 French runoff presidential elections which pitted far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen against the incumbent, Jacques Chirac. Between the two rounds of the election, demonstrators protested Le Pen’s quest for power at roughly 300 demonstrations. Using rainfall as an exogenous source of variation in demonstration attendance across municipalities, we find that larger protests reduced the number of votes for Le Pen and the number of abstentions and blank or invalid ballots, and increased the number of votes for Chirac. We show that this positive effect on voting for Chirac results from left-wing voters who did not cast a blank or invalid ballot and right-wing voters who switched from Le Pen to Chirac. Next, we focus on the mechanisms behind these results to find that the 2002 demonstrations both reduced support for the policies advocated by Le Pen and signaled that voting for him was socially undesirable. Finally, we provide evidence that demonstrations affected voting mainly through local media coverage and spread out beyond the municipalities that hosted the demonstrations.

We study the electoral impact of protesting against the far right by investigating the demonstrations held during the 2002 French presidential elections against far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen. Instrumenting rally attendance with rainfall while factoring in that some municipalities never host protests, we find that larger protests reduced both the number of votes for Le Pen and the number of abstentions, while increasing the number of votes for Chirac. Regarding the mechanisms behind these results, we show that protests reduced the social desirability of voting for Le Pen, the support for his policies, and generated spatial spillovers through local media.