Is Journalistic Truth Dead? Measuring How Informed Voters Are about Political News

By Charles Angelucci and Andrea Prat

American Economic Review, April 2024

To investigate general patterns in news information in the United States, we combine a protocol for identifying major political news stories, 11 monthly surveys with 15,000 participants, and a model of news discernment. When confronted with a true and a f...

When Tariffs Disrupt Global Supply Chains

By Gene M. Grossman, Elhanan Helpman, and Stephen J. Redding

American Economic Review, April 2024

We study unanticipated tariffs in a setting with firm-to-firm supply relationships. Firms conduct costly searches and negotiate with potential suppliers that pass a reservation level of match productivity. Global supply chains form in anticipation of free...

The Political Development Cycle: The Right and the Left in People's Republic of China from 1953

By Anton Cheremukhin, Mikhail Golosov, Sergei Guriev, and Aleh Tsyvinski

American Economic Review, April 2024

We quantify the effects of the political development cycle—the fluctuations between the Left (Maoist) and the Right (pragmatist) development policies—on growth and structural transformation of China in 1953–1978. The left policies prioritized struct...

The Fake News Effect: Experimentally Identifying Motivated Reasoning Using Trust in News

By Michael Thaler

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2024

Motivated reasoning posits that people distort how they process information in the direction of beliefs they find attractive. This paper creates a novel experimental design to identify motivated reasoning from Bayesian updating when people have preconceiv...

Media Competition and News Diets

By Charles Angelucci, Julia Cagé, and Michael Sinkinson

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2024

Technological innovations like broadcast television and the internet challenge local newspapers' business model of bundling their local content with third-party content, such as wire national news. We examine how the entry of television affected newspaper...

Racial and Ethnic Representation in Local Government

By Brian Beach, Daniel B. Jones, Tate Twinam, and Randall Walsh

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

Does the presence of underrepresented racial/ethnic groups in a legislative body differentially impact outcomes for members of those groups? We study close elections between White and non-White candidates for California city council and the corresponding ...

The Internet and International Trade in Services

By Caroline Freund and Diana Weinhold

American Economic Review, May 2002

Explaining Diversity: Symmetry-Breaking in Complementarity Games

By Kiminori Matsuyama

American Economic Review, May 2002

How Economists Could Help Inform Economic and Budget Analysis Used by the US Congress

[Symposium: How Research Informs Policy Analysis]

By Staff of the Congressional Budget Office

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2024

The US Congress uses economic and budgetary projections, cost estimates for proposed legislation, and other analyses provided by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) as part of its legislative process. CBO makes assessments based on an understanding of f...

The Economic Constitution of the United States

[Symposium: How Research Informs Policy Analysis]

By Cass R. Sunstein

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2024

The United States has an Economic Constitution, governing federal regulation, and explaining how to conduct regulatory impact analysis, with reference to quantification and monetization of the costs and benefits of proposed and final regulations. Known as...

When Privacy Protection Goes Wrong: How and Why the 2020 Census Confidentiality Program Failed

[Symposium: Privacy Protection and Government Data]

By Steven Ruggles

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2024

The US Census Bureau implemented a new disclosure control strategy for the 2020 Census that adds deliberate error to every population statistic for every geographic unit smaller than a state, including metropolitan areas, cities, and counties. This arti...

Do Earmarks Target Low-Income and Minority Communities? Evidence from US Drinking Water

By David A. Keiser, Bhashkar Mazumder, David Molitor, Joseph S. Shapiro, and Brant J. Walker

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

The quality and inequality of US drinking water investments have gained attention after recent environmental disasters in Flint, Michigan, and elsewhere. We compare the targeting of subsidized loans provided through the Safe Drinking Water Act with the ta...

Refugees Are Hosted in Highly Vulnerable Communities

By C. Austin Davis, Paula López-Peña, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, and Jaya Y. Wen

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

Low- and middle-income nations host 76 percent of the world's refugees. This study uses original data to explore within-country spatial variability in refugee-hosting responsibilities. We find that hosting responsibilities for the displaced Rohingya peopl...

The Intensifying Effects of Prolonged Climate Change on Conflict, 1400–1900 CE

By Murat Iyigun, Joris Mueller, and Nancy Qian

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

This study uses historical conflict and weather data for the period 1400–1900 CE to investigate the long-run effects of climate change on political instability in a context that suffered extensive cooling. The results show that temperature changes have ...

Algorithmic Recommendations When the Stakes Are High: Evidence from Judicial Elections

By Victoria Angelova, Will Dobbie, and Crystal S. Yang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

We ask whether increased public scrutiny leads to the more effective use of predictive algorithms. We focus on the context of bail, where judges face heightened public scrutiny during competitive partisan elections. We find that judges up for reelection a...

Media Slant and Public Policy Views

By Milena Djourelova, Ruben Durante, Elliot Motte, and Eleonora Patacchini

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2024

We study how exposure to partisan news channels (Fox News and MSNBC) affects individual views on four policy issues: climate change, gun rights, abortion, and immigration. First, using GPT to annotate news transcripts, we document large differences in the...

Local Economic and Political Effects of Trade Deals: Evidence from NAFTA

By Jiwon Choi, Ilyana Kuziemko, Ebonya Washington, and Gavin Wright

American Economic Review, June 2024

Why have white, less-educated voters left the Democratic Party? We highlight the role of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In event-study analysis, we demonstrate that counties whose 1990 employment depended on industries vulnerable to...

Universalism and Political Representation: Evidence from the Field

By Benjamin Enke, Raymond Fisman, Luis Mota Freitas, and Steven Sun

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2024

This paper provides field evidence on the link between morals and political behavior. We create a district-level variable that reflects to what degree charitable giving decreases as a function of (geographic and social) distance, which we interpret as a r...

The Political Economics of Non-democracy

By Georgy Egorov and Konstantin Sonin

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2024

We survey recent theoretical and empirical literature on political economics of non-democracies. Nondemocratic regimes face multiple challenges to their rule, both internal, such as palace coups or breakdown of their support coalition, and external, such ...

Activated History: The Case of the Turkish Sieges of Vienna

By Christian Ochsner and Felix Roesel

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2024

We show that history stored in collective memories and activated by political campaigns can create xenophobia and radicalization. Turkish troops besieged Vienna in 1529 and 1683 and pillaged individual Austrian villages, killing and kidnapping in the proc...