Essays in political and public economics[Essais en économie politique et publique]

This dissertation aims to shed light on how voters' interests are represented indemocratic systems and mapped into policies, which will ultimately affect their lives.In the first chapter, we explore the determinants of media bias. Using new data onhosts and guests in French television and radio shows from 2002 to 2020, wedocument a two tier slant: at the media level and at the host level. Studying mediatakeovers, we find that ownership affects the political affiliation of guests invited tospeak. The effect is driven by change in program types and changes in hosts. In thesecond paper, I ask whether politicians make grants to nonprofit organizations toimprove their electoral prospects. I collect new data on governmental transfers tononprofit organizations in France from 2005 to 2016. Using close elections in aregression discontinuity design, I show that politicians strategically allocate transfersto nonprofits if they are located where a government party local politician is in office.Such transfers complement campaign spending. Politicians target influentialorganizations whose political leaning is close to that of the government. My findingsare consistent with transfers improving government party politicians' electoraloutcomes. In the third paper, we study the distributive impact of tax reforms and inparticular, whether they benefit all workers equally. Studying a large corporate incometax credit targeted at lower wage workers, we find that about 50 percent of the policysurplus is passed on to workers through higher wages. Yet, only high-skill workers,who are not targeted by the policy, benefit. Contrasting with canonical models ofincidence, we find that the policy surplus is shared collectively at the firm level. Ourresults suggest that the reason why only the high-skill group succeeds in gettinghigher wages is because they are more costly to replace. The firm accepts to sharepart of the surplus to retain them.