Essays in political economy: Economic shocks and citizens' reactions and attitudes

My PhD thesis focuses on how economic shocks impact social attitudes and public policy preferences. The last two decades have seen considerable economic changes that changed both the structure of economies as well as the political and social landscapes. It is in that context that government have designed public policies. I aim to study this dynamic and in particular to address the following questions: How do people perceive economic shocks? What are people's expectations from the government in times of crisis? What types of public policies do people support or condemn? I study these research questions in three papers, assembled here in three chapters. My first paper looks at how Americans view automation via a survey experiment. I investigate why we have not seen an "automation" backlash even though the labor market consequences of automation and globalization have been similar. I find that respondents do not support more government intervention following an automation prime and identify two mechanisms. First, participants do not see automation as particularly unfair to workers and think that firms are justified in automating. Second, the automation treatment I use increases respondents' anxiety regarding automation's impact on American jobs in general but not on their own occupations. Hence, while an automation prime increases average anxiety levels, respondents do not feel personally threatened by robots. My second paper looks at the impact of a cut in welfare benefits in the UK on a particular segment of the population: young people. In particular it examines whether and how they updated political attitudes following the 2012 Welfare Reform Act. I show that the welfare cuts had a negative effect on young people's opinion of politicians and made them more prone to political disengagement. Finally, my third paper is co-authored with Laurence Boone and estimates the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) and the COVID sanitary situation on mobility in advanced OECD countries. Overall, we find that restrictions affected mobility in advanced OECD economies much more than fears of COVID infection. This effect is more visible during the first wave than during the second as the influence of the sanitary situation gained weight during the second wave. This is probably due to (i) a second wave stronger than the first in many countries, (ii) while NPIs were, on average, less stringent during the second wave, leaving more room for voluntary social distancing.