Professor
Department of Economics, The Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Evaluation of Public Policies (LIEPP)
Research Interest(s): Democracy, Information Economics, Political Economy, Development Economics, Taxation, Media, Populism, Elections.
Discipline(s): Economics
Language(s): English
Julia CAGÉ is Full Professor of Economics since 2024 - she joined the Department in 2014 and was tenured in 2021. She is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), where she also leads the CEPR Research and Policy Network on “Media Plurality”, and a Research Fellow at the CESifo Research Network.
From 2018 to 2023, she was the co-director of the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Evaluation of Public Policies (LIEPP)’s “Evaluation of Democracy” research group, and from 2015 to 2022, a Board member of the Agence France Presse (third largest international news agency in the world).
Her research focuses on political economy, industrial organization and economic history. She is particularly interested in media economics, political participation and political attitudes. Her research has been published in a number of peer-reviewed international journals such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Public Economics, the Review of Economic Studies, the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, Explorations in Economic History, the Journal of International Economics, and the European Economic Review.
In 2021 she was awarded an European Research Council Starting Grant for her 5-year project Campaign Finance, Information and Influence: A ComprehensIve Approach Using Individual-Level Data and Computer Science Tools (PARTICIPATE) which studies, notably, blindspots in the economic literature on the funding of political parties and the representativity of candidates for their electoral campaigns.
Her latest research projects, selected recently by McCourt Institute for substantial grants in 2022 and 2023, explore issues related to information in the digital age (the spread of disinformation on social media and online news) but also look at resolving them (how to slow down disinformation, how to ensure access to quality information).
In 2023, she was laureate of the Best Young French Economist Award (ex aequo) bestowed by the Le Cercle des économistes and Le Monde and co-laureate of the Yrjö Jahnsson Award in 2025.
Julia Cagé is also well-known to the general public for her books in which she proposes concrete, radical solutions after meticulously scrutinizing her topic. She has authored three books on the media, one of which - Saving the Media. Capitalism, Crowdfunding and Democracy (Paris, Le Seuil, 2015) - was awarded the Special Jury Prize for Best Book on Media of the 2016 edition of the “Prix des Assises du Journalisme”. Her latest critically acclaimed work « The Price of Democracy » (at Fayard in 2018, English edition at Harvard University Press, 2020) was awarded the Prix Pétrarque de l’essai by Le Monde and France Culture in 2019. Most recently she co-authored a book with Thomas Piketty "Une histoire du conflit politique. Elections et inégalités sociales en France, 1789-2022", edited by Seuil and published in September 2023.
After completing her university studies at Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) and Paris School of Economics, Julia Cagé obtained her PhD at Harvard University in 2014.
To learn more about Julia CAGÉ, consult her website