Uber paid high-profile academics in Europe and the US hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce reports that could be used as part of the company’s lobbying campaign.

The Uber files, a cache of thousands of confidential documents leaked to the Guardian, reveal lucrative deals with several leading academics who were paid to publish research on the benefits of its economic model. The reports were commissioned as Uber wrestled with regulators in key cities around the world.

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One report by a French academic, who asked for a €100,000 consultancy fee, was cited in a 2016 Financial Times report as evidence that Uber was a “route out of the French banlieues”, delighting Uber executives.

Using techniques common in party political campaigns, Uber targeted academics and thinktanks to help it construct a positive narrative, namely that it created well-paid jobs that drivers liked, delivered cheap transport to consumers and boosted productivity.

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In France, the €100,000 consultancy arrangement was negotiated with a rising star of university economics, Prof Augustin Landier of the Toulouse School of Economics. Landier agreed to produce a report that he described in emails to Uber’s policy and communications team as “actionable for direct PR to prove Uber’s positive economic role”.

Landier proposed collaborating with David Thesmar, another high-profile professor from France’s top business school, École des Hautes Études Commerciales de Paris (HEC).

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The day before the publication of Landier and Thesmar’s report in March 2016, the FT story citing it appeared. “Ride-hailing apps have created jobs for Paris’s poorer youth, but a regulatory clampdown looms,” the article said.

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The report detailed how these drivers received “payouts” on average of €19.90 an hour. But that did not factor in the substantial costs that drivers have to pay – such as car hire, insurance and fuel – that had to be deducted from this average “payout” before earnings could be calculated. In the FT’s story, which was retweeted by Landier and others, this became simply: “Most earn €20 an hour, more than twice the minimum wage.”

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Hubert Horan, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Stigler Center and a long-term critic of Uber’s model, said academics generally ignored the fact that Uber was spending billions of dollars of investor cash to subsidise both drivers and passengers and that “payouts” to drivers were not the same as income. Claims about the quality of jobs or prices were therefore unsustainable, he argued.