UPF Professor of Economics Ruben Durante has been nominated for a 2017 Science Award from the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia. Prof. Durante is amongst the eight finalists selected from across Spain in recognition of outstanding research in all fields of science from the year. The winner of the award will be announced at the end of March.

Prof. Durante was chosen for his recent study titled "Attack When The World Is Not Watching: U.S. Media And The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict", which showed that politicians plan unpopular actions to coincide with other major national news in order to avoid media coverage and wider accountability to citizens.

The paper was written in collaboration with Ekaterina Zhuravskaya from the Paris School of Economics, and is forthcoming in the Journal of Political Economy. The study analysed data from 2000-2011 which covered both daily data on attacks between Israel and Palestine, as well as the content of news programmes on American networks ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC.

The research found that politicians strategically time unpopular measures to coincide with news-worthy events that distract the media and the public. Israeli attacks were shown to be more likely to occur when U.S. news on the following day was dominated by important predictable events such as sports games or political events.

UPF Economics and Business professors are regularly nominated for the La Vanguardia award. Last year two Department professors were separately nominated, Profs. Rosa Ferrer and Luigi Pascali.

Learn more about this research through an interview with Prof. Durante, a detailed write-up at VoxEU, or his personal webpage.