Essays on Political Economy and the European Union

This thesis is a collection of essays about political economy, in particular to the relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union. The second chapter aims to analyse whether and to what extent negative newspaper coverage of topics relating to immigration concerns influenced the percentage of leave votes in the 2016 European Union (EU) membership referendum. Using data at constituency level, I find that negative newspaper coverage had a small, statistically significant and positive effect on the percentage of EU leave votes mainly in constituencies in the bottom quarter of the education qualification distribution. This work in the third chapter generalises the work of Besley and Prat (2006) analysing political media capture by bribing some or all media outlets in the event of an election. The most crucial item of generalisation which I introduce is that the challenger politician can observe any bribing by the incumbent politician to the media outlets and has an opportunity to make counter-offers. The most important novel finding is that under sufficiently general conditions, there exists one Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium for which total media capture never arises in equilibrium. The final chapter decomposes differentials in wages and propensities to work a second job of nationals of countries which joined the European Union (EU) in 2004 relative to natives to analyse their integration in the British Labour Market, before and after their accession. This paper finds that at the mean migrants who arrived at least 5 years prior being better integrated in all periods. The Quantile decomposition and finds that joining the European Union improved the labour market outcomes of A10 nationals at the bottom of the wage distribution at the cost of creating a glass ceiling. The logit Oaxaca decomposition results reveal that migrants are significantly more likely to work second jobs after 2004.