Julia Cagé has a twin sister, Agathe Cagé, who is a technocrat and currently an advisor to Najat Vallaud-Belkacem.[1]
Cagé attended prep school in letters and social sciences at Lycée Thiers in Marseille. From 2005 to 2010 she and her twin studied at the École normale supérieure of Paris.[2]
From 2010 to 2014 she was a doctoral student in economics at Harvard. She received her PhD in ecomomics there in 2014 under Nathan Nunn[3] In 2013, she defended a thesis at the school of advanced studies in social sciences (EHESS), Essays in the Political Economy of Information and Taxation, under the direction of Daniel Cohen.[4]
Since July 2014, Julia Cagé has been an assistant professor of Economics at Sciences Po Paris.
[7][8][9][10][11]
Publications
Saving the media
In February 2015, Julia Cagé published Saving the media: Capitalism, crowdfunding and democracy.
Nonprofit Media Organization (NMO)
This book reviews existing models for funding the media, evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of each, and proposes a new structure for "saving the media", which she calls a "Nonprofit Media Organization (NMO)".
The fundamental problem with existing media organizations is that they have either not been self sustaining or they have such inherent conflicts of interest that their coverage becomes a threat to democracy.
Her NMO is a charitable foundation but with democratic governance, limiting the power of the major donors while encouraging crowdfunding.
Discussion
This book was widely reviewed in the mainstream French media: Les Échos,[12]Libération,[13]Télérama,[14]Les Inrocks,[15]La Croix,[8]Mediapart,[16]Alternatives économiques,[17] France Culture,[18] Europe 1,[19] France 24[20] and France inter.[21]
By 2016 it was available in translation into 10 other languages: English, Chinese, German, Italian, Japanese, Korea, Portuguese, Serbian, Spanish, and Turkish.[22]
In this book, she proposes a new model for organizing media: a nonprofit media organization (NMO), which combines aspects of both a joint-stock company and a foundation. The goal is to allow sharing and democratic renewal of power and funding. Readers, journalists and other, "crowdfunders", would see their contributions in capital recognized by an increase in voting rights at the expense of the power of the largest shareholders. Media would thus benefit from open donations and reductions in taxes. Cagé claims these will replace the current media subsidies, which are often opaque and innefective, with a "neutral, transparent and citizen" support system.[13]Éric Fottorino claimed that this model will not likely work well for large media, which he believes will not function well without shareholders, who will demand influence in proportion to their investment.[18].
This book is based on Cagé's analysis of the historical evolution of the media and their modes of governance and financing in Europe and the United States since the beginning of the twentieth century. This includes previous work on the impact of sometimes excessive competition between media organization, focusing especially on the experience of the regional daily press in France since 1945.[23]
This book received the 2016 prize for a book discussing research in the media by the French Journalism Foundation (Assises du journalisme).[24][25]
Globalization and financing public goods
In a 2012 article written with Lucie Gadenne, Cagé showed that trade liberalization in developing countries generally “led to larger and longer-lived decreases in total tax revenues in developing countries since the 1970s than in rich countries in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The fall in total tax revenues lasts more than ten years in half the developing countries in our sample.” This led to serious reductions in the funds available for public goods indispensable for economic growth and the developpement: education, health, infrastructure, etc.[26]
Media in Africa
Work coauthored by Valeria Rueda studied the long-term consequences of the introduction of printing presses on the development of media in different African countries. To be precise, they studied the impact of protest missions in Africa based on their locations in 1903, each of which had its own printing press to print bibles and educational materials. Cagé and Rueda found that “within regions close to missions, proximity to a printing press is associated with higher newspaper readership, trust, education, and political participation.”[27][28] This extended her 2014 analysis of specific issues and challenges encountered in the development of specific to Africa, noting that this process in Africa may have been different from the comparable experience in other regions of the world.[29]
Development aid, international trade and reputations of countries
In a series of articles written between 2009 and 2014, Cagé argued that development assistance is more effective in countries with greater transparency of information. Moreover, international aid organizations fail to give adequate weight to the quality of local media and democratic processes.[30][31]
In 2015 Cagé and Dorothée Rouzet documented how national brands can have a substantial impact on international trade. For this they study the coverage of different countries in the media of importing countries.[32] This work displayed a new way to understand the importance of information and credible media for economic development.[33]
Politics
Supported François Hollande for President of France in 2012
In the French presidential election of 2012, Cagé was one of nine economists publicly supporting the candidacy of François Holland due to his platform, especially regarding economic growth and employment.[34]
Supporting Benoît Hamon for President of France in 2017
In January 2016, in the run-up to the presidential election in 2017, Cagé was one of eleven initiators of a call for primary on the left.[35][36] On January 24, 2017, she coauthored a call to support Benoît Hamon for the 2107 citizen's primary, entitled "For a credible and bold universal income."[37]La Tribune tweeted that these economists die not support a real universal income. Cagé replied that [La Tribune]] was hallucinating, and “We (Saez, Chancel, Landais...) wrote a call to support a universal income.”[38][39]
After the second round of the primary and the election of fr:Benoît Hamon, Thomas Piketty provided more details behind the terms of payment of the proposal for a basic income supported by the call previously issued by him, Cagé, and others.[40] Cagé became Hamon's chief economist.[41]
^Cagé, Julia (March 2014), "The Economics of the African Media", Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Oxford U. Pr., pp. 605–625, retrieved 2017-02-13
^{{Citation
Asymetric information, rent extraction and efficiency », 2009 [archive].
| last = Cagé
| first = Julia
| year = 2009
| title =
Asymmetric information, rent extraction and aid efficiency
| issue = 2009-45
| publisher = Paris School of Economics
| url = https://sites.google.com/site/juliacagehomepage/research
| accessdate = 2017-02-13}}
^Cagé, Julia; Rouzet, Dorothée (2015), "Improving national brands. Reputation for quality and export promotion policies", Journal of International Economics