Arianna Ornaghi

Civil Service Reforms

Does reducing politicians’ control over public employees’ hiring and firing improve bureaucratic performance? Arianna Ornaghi answers this question exploiting population-based mandates for U.S. municipal police department merit systems in a regression discontinuity design. Merit system mandates improve performance: crime rates are lower in departments operating under a merit system than in departments under a spoils system. Changes in resources or police officers’ characteristics do not drive the effect, but Mr. Ornaghi provides suggestive evidence that the limitations to politicians’ ability to influence police officers are instead important.

Ms. Omaghi is an Applied Microeconomist who specializes in Empirical Political Economy. A large part of her current research agenda, which she will further during her visit to CESifo, is focused on the economics of media. In recent work, she studies whether municipal police departments in the US respond to news coverage of local crime, how attention on social media translates into campaign donations for US members of congress, and what determines a new outlet’s decision to cover extreme weather events. In a current research project, Arianna Omaghi and others are studying the effect of conglomerate ownership on the content and advertising choices of local TV stations in the United States, and the response of viewers. The researchers document significant conglomerate ownership effect on content and advertising, although there is large heterogeneity across groups. Viewers limitedly respond.

Arianna Ornaghi is currently an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Hertie School and a Research Affiliate at CEPR (Public Economics Group). Before joining Hertie, she was a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Warwick. She graduated from MIT with a PhD in Economics.