We estimate an equilibrium model of decision-making in the US Supreme Court which takes into account both private information and ideological differences between justices. We present a measure of the value of information in the court. Our measure is the probability that a justice votes differently that what she would have voted for in the absence…
This paper analyzes the effects of information about inequality and taxes on preferences for redistribution using randomized online surveys on Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk). About 5,000 respondents were randomized into treatments providing interactive information on U.S. income inequality, the link between top income tax rates and economic growth…
Prior International Political Economy (IPE) public opinion research has primarily examined how economic and socio-cultural factors shape individuals' views on the flows of goods, people, and capital. What has largely been ignored is whether individuals also care about rewarding or punishing foreign countries for their policies on these subjects…
After decades of convergence, the gender gap in employment outcomes has recently plateaued in many rich countries, despite the fact that women have increased their investment in human capital over this period. We propose a hypothesis to reconcile these two trends: that when they are making key human capital decisions, women in modern cohorts…
Political and social polarization are a significant cause of conflict and poor gover-nance in many societies, thus understanding their causes is of considerable importance. Here we demonstrate that shifts in socialization strategy similar to political polarization and/or identity politics could be a constructive response to periods of apparent…
As many crises do not evolve into full scale conflict, and almost all conflicts end short of war, an important question is how states manage uncertainty? This thesis investigates the relationships between uncertainty, rhetoric, alliances, and combat. The thesis consists of four articles. Much ado about nothing? Diplomacy, war, and the incentive to…
In this paper we reassess the literature of growth by looking at the evolution of the European economy from around 1200 to 1900. Employing a comprehensive dataset for the European continent that includes geographic and climate features (1200-1800), urbanization data (1200-1800), per capita income data in the second half of the 19th century,…
Income inequality and political polarization have both increased dramatically in the United States over the last several decades. A small but growing literature has suggested that these two phenomena may be related and mutually reinforcing: income inequality leads to political polarization, and the gridlock induced by polarization reduces the…
We study a dynamic matching environment where individuals arrive sequentially. There is a tradeoff between waiting for a thicker market, allowing for higher quality matches, and minimizing agents' waiting costs. The optimal mechanism cumulates a stock of incongruent pairs up to a threshold and matches all others in an assortative fashion…
Supreme Court doctrine grants special protection against laws that “chill” protected speech, most prominently via the overbreadth doctrine. The overbreadth doctrine permits persons whose own speech is unprotected to challenge laws that infringe the protected speech of third parties. The Court has not generally applied overbreadth and the other…
We estimate 11 well-studied behavioral phenomena in a group of 190 laboratory subjects (short-term discount rates, small stakes risk aversion, present bias, loss aversion, the endowment effect, aversion to ambiguity and compound lotteries, the common ratio and common consequence effects and sender/receiver behavior in trust games). We study the…
This article reviews recent research on how mass opinion affects policy making in the context of US national institutions. Three themes materialize. First, research provides compelling evidence for “responsiveness,” in which change in mass opinion is associated with subsequent policy changes, but not for a high level of “congruence” between the…
Over the several decades, observers of American politics have noted the sharp increase in partisanship and ideological polarization among members of Congress. While better ideological differentiation may provide voters clearer choices and increase accountability, the results of recent partisan and ideological battles have raised questions about…
Theories of multilateral bargaining and coalition formation applied to legislatures predict that parties' seat shares determine their bargaining power. We present findings that are difficult to reconcile with this prediction. We use data from 2,898 municipal Spanish elections in which two parties tie in the number of seats. The party with slightly…
By downplaying externalities, magnifying the cost of moral behavior, or suggesting not being pivotal, exculpatory narratives can allow individuals to maintain a positive image when in fact acting in a morally questionable way. Conversely, responsibilizing narratives can help sustain better social norms. We investigate when narratives emerge from a…
