My research agenda currently focuses on technological change and Artificial Intelligence.

WORKING PAPERS

balancing progress and protection: public support for technology regulation, With Alexander Kuo

The rapid progression of the fourth industrial revolution has sparked debate about its economic impacts, and prompted calls for increased government steering of technological advancements. This study analyzes the foundations of public support for policies that regulate and tax new technologies. We propose that policy preferences are shaped by two prevailing narratives about technology. The 'pro-technology' narrative emphasizes the benefits for economic growth and consumers, while the 'anti-technology' narrative highlights potential harms to certain workers and communities. To investigate the influence of these narratives on public opinion, we design novel survey questions about six pertinent policies, and we experimentally vary the arguments presented to respondents. We embed our experiments in large, representative samples from European Union countries and measure objective and subjective technological risks, including of job substitution by artificial intelligence (AI). We find substantial support for technology regulation. Pro-technology claims diminish support significantly but anti-technology arguments enhance support only modestly. We discuss the implications of our results in light of growing concern about AI.
Draft available on request

Historical Family types and female political representation: Persistence and changE, With Dídac Queralt and Ana Tur-Prats (R&R)

We argue that different historical family configurations shaped the gendered division of labor within the household, gender norms, and female political representation in the long run. Our main evidence draws from geographic variation in historical family types in Spain and municipality-level electoral data from 1978 to 2015 and earlier democratic spells. We find that areas where the stem family was prevalent-meaning that multiple generations of women lived together and shared domestic work-show higher female political representation than areas with nuclear-family tradition. Still, history is not destiny, and the impact of historical legacies can fade. In our mechanisms analyses, we demonstrate that the introduction of party-list gender quotas balanced off the main effect, although they did not erase underlying differences between regions in gender attitudes and female paid employment. Our research contributes to the study of historical persistence by assessing what institutions can and cannot do to combat patriarchal prejudice.
Working paper here

Support for Digitalization acceleration: Evidence from EU’s Next Generation Program, With Alexander Kuo, Silja HÄusermann, and Reto BürgissER

Digitalization policies are becoming increasingly economically and politically relevant, but we know little about public opinion towards these policies. We use the case of the EU’s Next Generation (NG) program, aimed at expediting digitalization in Europe via spending close to 800,000 million euros in the years following the Covid-19 pandemic, as a substantively and theoretically important example to test rival theories about the political fault lines these policies may entail. In particular, we contrast expectations that follow from considering digitalization policies as a case of “knowledge economy/social investment” policies to those that consider this policy as classical instances of state intervention in the economy and industrial policy. We gathered new survey data from five EU countries (Germany, France, Sweden, Poland, and Italy) with detailed new measures on knowledge about the Next Generation program, support for digitalization policies, expected economic impact, and perceptions about the main beneficiaries. Our findings suggest that supporters of digitalization policies do not clearly coincide with theoretically derived social groups. However, it is the case that these policies are most favored by supporters of mainstream parties and least favored by supporters of populist parties. To conclude, we discuss the potential for politicization of these policies in a context of growing tensions between voters who support the political status quo and those who don’t.

OTHER WORK IN PROGRESS

The International Governance of Artificial Intelligence
With Alexander Kuo and Shir Raviv
Data collection in progress

What if you see it? Workers' perceptions of and reactions to LLMs
With Massimo Anelli, Italo Colantone, and Piero Stanig
Data collection in progress

CURRENT FUNDED RESEARCH PROJECTS

Transforming European Work and Social Protection (TRANSEUROWORKS) as PI of the Spanish team
Awarded by the European Commission, H2020 program
November 2022 - October 2026

Citizen Attitudes toward Artificial Intelligence (CATAI) as PI
Awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation
January 2023 - December 2026