Published Research
Identity, Beliefs and Political Conflict, with Nicola Gennaioli and Guido Tabellini, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 136 (2021), 2371–2411 [pdf] [appendix]
Abstract: We present a theory of identity politics that builds on two ideas. First, when policy conflict renders a certain social divide—economic or cultural—salient, a voter identifies with her economic or cultural group. Second, the voter slants her beliefs toward the stereotype of the group she identifies with. We obtain three implications. First, voters’ beliefs are polarized along the distinctive features of salient groups. Second, if the salience of cultural policies increases, cultural conflict rises, redistributive conflict falls, and polarization becomes more correlated across issues. Third, economic shocks hurting conservative voters may trigger a switch to cultural identity, causing these voters to demand less redistribution. We discuss U.S. survey evidence in light of these implications.
Working Papers
When Monetary Policy for Financial Stability Backfires, with Ali Uppal, Conditionally Accepted, Journal of Economic Theory [pdf]
Abstract: We propose a novel model to study the consequences of including financial stability among the central bank's objectives when market players are strategic, and surprises compromise their stability. In this setup, central banks underreact to economic shocks, consistently with the Federal Reserve’s behavior during the 2023 banking crisis. Moreover, policymakers’ stability concerns bias investors' choices, inducing inefficiency. If the central bank has private information about its policy intentions, the equilibrium forward guidance entails an information loss, highlighting a trade-off between stabilizing markets through policy and communication. A "kitish" central banker, less concerned with financial stability, reduces these inefficiencies. With repeated interactions, the central bank might leverage communication to fully discipline markets.
The Division of Understanding: Specialization and Democratic Accountability [pdf]
Abstract: This paper studies how the organization of production shapes democratic accountability. I propose a model in which learning economies make specialization productively efficient: most workers perform one-domain tasks, while a small set of integrators with cross-domain knowledge keep the system coherent. When policy consequences run across domains, integrators understand them better than specialists. Electoral competition then tilts targeted services toward integrators' interests, while low aggregate system knowledge weakens governance and reduces the fraction of public resources converted into citizen-valued services. Labor markets leave these civic margins unpriced, failing to internalize the political returns to system knowledge. Broadening specialists can therefore raise welfare relative to the market allocation. The model speaks to debates on liberal arts education and the effects of AI.
Divide and Diverge [pdf]
Abstract: This paper shows that competing political parties can benefit from polarization. I study a probabilistic voting model with ex-ante identical parties and decreasing marginal utility from political power. In equilibrium, parties offer different platforms: by targeting different voter blocks, they insure against electoral risk and stabilize power. With one policy dimension, each party gains when voters on opposite sides of the median become more divided, even if only the opponent's supporters become more extreme. With multiple dimensions, parties gain from ideological coherence, the alignment of disagreement across issues. The results speak to polarizing communication, party identity, and electoral institutions.
Disagreement Spillovers [pdf] [NEW slides]
Abstract: Political messages increasingly bundle economic policy arguments with moral social policy stances. Using survey experiments with roughly 6,500 U.S. adults, I show that such bundling sharply weakens economic persuasion among respondents who disagree with the social stance: support falls by 13–20 percentage points relative to when the same economic message is sent alone, sometimes moving below pre-message levels. Bundling an aligned social stance does not increase persuasion. The main results are not driven by party cues, generalize across policy pairs, and are largely one-directional from social to economic issues, consistent with the predictions of a model of identity-based distancing.
Team Disagreement and Productive Persuasion [pdf]
Abstract: We study how open disagreement influences team performance in a dynamic production game. Team members can hold different priors about the productivity of the available production technologies. Initial beliefs are common knowledge and updated based on observed production outcomes. We show that when only one technology is available, a player works harder early on when her coworkers are initially more pessimistic about the technology's productivity. Holding average team optimism constant, this force implies that a team's expected output increases in the degree of disagreement of its members. A manager with the task of forming two-member teams from a large workforce maximizes total expected output by matching coworkers' beliefs in a negative assortative way. When alternative equally good production technologies are available, a disagreeing team outperforms any like-minded team in terms of average output and team members' welfare.
In Progress
Polarizing Effects of Political Propaganda with Guido Tabellini