Maja Adena

Bombing, Enemy Propaganda and Resistance

In one of her current projects (with R. Enikolopov, M. Petrova, and H.-J. Voth), Maja Adena has studied, in the context of Germany during World War II, whether foreign media and air power turn people against their own authoritarian government. The authors collected data on individuals tried for high treason before the People’s Court, and combined it with information on the bombing of over 1,000 German towns and cities during the peak of the Allied air offensive. Using plausibly exogenous variation in BBC German Services signal strength and in the intensity of Allied bombing, causal effects can be pinned down: Places that suffered more wartime destruction from the air and with better reception of Radio London, saw markedly more opposition. Where bombing coincided with a strong BBC signal, it was particularly effective in convincing Germans to conspire against their own government. In addition, pre-existing political attitudes, as reflected in 1933 vote shares, amplified the effectiveness of foreign propaganda. Effects on German morale extended to the armed forces: Fighter pilots from bombed-out cities performed markedly less well after raids.

Maja Adena’s academic interests are mainly in the field of public economics. In particular, she is interested in charitable giving and non-profit organisations carrying out (field) experiments on the optimal design of a fundraising campaign. In the field of political economy she works on persuasion, studying the question of how far the media can influence individual preferences and behaviour. Her research is also concerned with poverty and deprivation and its impact on individual well-being.

In her recent work in the field of the economics of philanthropy, she proposes (together with S. Huck) improvements to a widely used fundraising method of donation matching by a large donor that has been shown in the literature to have some inferior properties. One of the proposed schemes includes matching money benefiting another project than the one for which the money is solicited. Another proposed scheme relies on personalisation of donation asks and fixed matching amount that is added to the donation upon its value exceeding a pre-specified personalized value. The authors show that setting the threshold equal to the past donation (or, in case of non-donors, predicted) increased gift values while raising the level of the threshold by 60-75% generates an additional boost of donation values.

Maja Adena is a postdoctoral researcher at WZB Berlin Social Science Center. She received her doctoral degree in Economics from the Free University of Berlin and finished the Berlin Doctoral Program in Economics and Management Science in 2013. She is a member of the board of directors of the Berlin Center for Consumer Policies and a chairperson of the WZB ethics committee. Her work has been published or accepted in leading journals in Economics including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Management Science and the Journal of Public Economics.