Lily Shevchenko
I am a fourth year PhD student in Economics in University of Warwick and a Junior Fellow at the Centre for Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE).
I am primarily interested in political economy and applied microeconomics. My research uses unconventional data and natural language processing techniques to study how norms, institutions and narratives impact economic outcomes.
I am on the job market in the 2026/27 academic year.
My advisors are Thiemo Fetzer, Mirko Draca and Sascha Becker.
Email: liliia.shevchenko@warwick.ac.uk
Job market paper: Can hate speech be banned online? The effects of shutting down toxic forums on Reddit
with Adam Di Lizia
Is deplatforming effective in reducing levels of hate speech on social media? To answer this question we study a policy change on Reddit which led to a simultaneous ban of thousands of forums containing hateful content, but not the users of those forums. We use data on the near universe of comments left on Reddit to examine the impact of the ban on user behaviour in a differences-in-differences design. We find that the most active users of banned subreddits comment more after the policy change and substitute to new forums in the weeks after the ban. The increase in activity persists in the long run, but is not associated with higher levels of hate speech: instead, the comments left by affected users outside banned subreddits contain 20% fewer instances of slurs. We do not find evidence that the policy leads to lower quality of engagement, negative spillover effects or re-creation of banned forums elsewhere on the platform. Overall, the results suggest that community-level moderation can be effective in combating hate speech without lowering user engagement, and thus can be aligned with platforms’ incentives.