Research Seminar
15:30 pm, Thursday, 30 March 2023

The talk will discuss two working papers. The first paper investigates the effect of Covid-19 exposure on voting behavior in the 2020 US presidential elections. The goal is to shed light on how exposure to Covid-19 affects voting behavior, on what the results of the elections would be in the absence of the pandemic and whether this effect is the same for individuals with different demographic characteristics and different residential geographic locations. The second paper investigates whether living among people of different racial backgrounds influences one’s preferences for redistribution. We combine individual and zip-code data, nearly covering the entirety of the U.S. population, to understand whether living in a neighborhood with different racial identities shapes preferences for redistribution.

About the speaker

Dr. Petrou is a research scholar/fellow at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and the University of Cyprus. He obtained a PhD degree in Economics from the University of Cyprus, an MSc in Economic Analysis (2012) at the University of Cyprus, an MSc in Monetary and Financial Economics (2009), and a BSc in Economics from the University of Thessaly (2007). He obtained a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship, from the European Commission, for his proposal titled “The Role of Social Identity on Preferences for Redistribution” (Proposal number: 894128). His primary research interests are in the areas of empirical econometrics, inequality, political economy, preferences for redistribution, social identity, and social interactions.