We explore how contemporary attacks against academic freedom and illiberal policies have detrimental effects on innovation, focusing on academic research. Using rich national research repositories and international bibliometric data, we show that academics’ research trajectories diverge sharply depending on their perceived political alignment and investigates the mechanisms explaining this difference. Academics perceived as political opponents experience large declines both in publication output and collaboration networks, each falling by about one quarter relative to pre-shock levels. Researchers working on politically sensitive topics are also disproportionately affected: they experience a 10% decline in total publications and a 30% decline in publications in top journals. Targeted researchers experience a loss of co-authors and are likely to shift their research agendas in response to these threats. Finally, we conduct cross-country comparisons at the individual level to estimate the global effect of the declining academic freedom. We find that Hungarian researchers increasingly reallocate their publication efforts toward lower-ranked national-language journals and are more likely to leave the country altogether.

The 2018 China Initiative by the Trump administration complicated procedures and reduced funding for US-China research collaborations. Using Scopus data, we analyze its impact on Chinese research. We find that the China Initiative significantly lowered the average quality of both the publications and the co-authors of Chinese researchers with prior US collaborations compared to Chinese researchers with prior European collaborations. Thus, we estimate that the China Initiative reduced yearly citations for affected Chinese researchers by 6 percent. The effect was stronger for high-productivity Chinese researchers in US-dominated fields, especially when their US co-authors played a leading role.

We contribute to the debate on the production of ideas by examining the scientific production of an entire field. We map the evolution of economic research by classifying 300,000 articles published in 1950--2020 using text analysis methods. We identify 90 distinct topics, each characterized by a coherent set of themes and vocabulary. We document three main empirical patterns. First, topics tend to show a rise-and-fall life cycle: their publication share increases during an expansion phase, peaks, and then gradually declines. Second, despite these topic-level cycles, the aggregate scientific activity grows over time, both at the global and topic levels. Third, this growth is accompanied by a constant ``reset'' in the topic composition of the discipline, with newer topics progressively displacing older ones. Altogether, our findings have implications for the debate about whether or not ideas are harder to find.

Can party behaviour explain why gender equality policies fail to increase women’s political representation? Using data from seven municipal elections, we show that Brazilian political parties undermine gender quotas and funding requirements by strategically placing female candidates in races where they expect weak performance while reserving “sure” races for men. Despite national-level compliance requirements, weak enforcement at the municipal level enables this strategic distribution across localities based on electoral competitiveness. In municipalities that are historically electoral strongholds, the share of female candidates increased more after quota implementation than in competitive municipalities, driven by a larger increase among non-dominant parties. Conversely, dominant parties reduced all-male candidate lists 23.5% less than their counterparts in competitive races. We document a sharp increase in token female candidacies after the adoption of gender quotas, reduced by the introduction of campaign funding requirements. Our results point to the importance of factoring electoral competition and party responses when designing gender equality policies.

This paper studies the long-run political consequences of forced displacement when refugees carry distinct political ideas. With the collapse of the Spanish Republic in 1939, 500,000 left-wing leaning refugees fled into France, where logistical constraints quasi-randomly determined refugee camp locations. Exploiting this setting, we identify the causal effect of refugee exposure on political behaviour. Exposed municipalities shift away from Socialist support toward the Communist Party and display greater resistance activity and left-wing associational life, consistent with the diffusion of political ideas. Drawing on new individual-level data, we show that refugees concentrated near camp sites over the long run, providing a demographic channel through which political effects persisted and resurfaced in local political participation patterns decades later.