CESifo Network

During his CESifo visit, Ro’ee Levy will focus on studying the demand and supply of news slant. The internet and social media have dramatically transformed the news landscape. The abundance of online news options, recommendations of social media algorithms, and changes in news production may have segregated individuals into echo chambers, environments where people mostly consume like-minded news. Such echo chambers could exacerbate polarization, distort perceptions of reality, and threaten democracy. However, a gap remains between these grave concerns and the limited evidence on echo chambers.

Alexey Makarin’s research agenda spans the economics of media and digitization, as well as the political economy of conflict and trade. His research has been published in top academic journals, such as the American Economic Review and Econometrica.

Alexey Makarin is an Assistant Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he also holds the title of Mitsubishi Career Development Assistant Professor in International Management. He is a Research Fellow in Political Economy at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and a member of CEPR’s Research Policy Network on Geoeconomics. He is currently on leave from the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance (EIEF) in Rome.

While at CESifo, Thomas Moutos plans to advance work on the impact of tariff wars on individual welfare and on relative national economic power. This involves analysis of a North-South general equilibrium model in which the structure of international trade is determined by intercountry differences in technology and income distribution. Preliminary analysis indicates that the impact of a tariff war on relative economic power and welfare hinges on a hitherto under-explored issue, i.e. the differential impact across countries that tariffs may have on labor force participation rates.