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
Monetary Policy and Communication with Strategic Financial Markets, with Ali Uppal, Revise and Resubmit, 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.
Divide and Diverge [pdf]
Abstract: Political polarization can be beneficial to competing political parties. I study how electoral competition itself generates incentives to polarize voters, even when parties are ex ante identical and motivated purely by political power, interpreted as office rents or influence. I develop a probabilistic voting model with aggregate popularity shocks in which parties have decreasing marginal utility from political power. Equilibrium policy convergence fails. Platform differentiation provides insurance against electoral volatility by securing loyal voter bases and stabilizing political power. In a unidimensional policy space, parties' equilibrium payoffs rise as voters on opposite sides of the median become more extreme, including when polarization is driven by changes in the opponent's supporters. In a multidimensional setting, parties benefit from ideological coherence, the alignment of disagreements across issues. The results have implications for polarizing political communication, party identity, and electoral institutions.
Disagreement Spillovers [pdf] [NEW slides]
Abstract: Political elites increasingly bundle economic policy messages with positions on moral social policy issues. This paper studies how such bundling affects economic persuasion. In a series of survey experiments with roughly 6,500 U.S. adults, respondents receive an economic policy recommendation either on its own or bundled with a morally-charged stance on a social policy issue from the same source. I find that bundling sharply reduces economic persuasion among respondents who disagree with the social stance (13-20 percentage points relative to the same economic message without social content), and can generate backlash relative to a no-message control. In contrast, bundling an aligned social stance does not meaningfully increase economic persuasion. The effect disappears when the social policy and economic statements are attributed to different sources, generalizes to different policy pairs, and is largely one-directional from social to economic policy issues. I show that a Bayesian trust model predicts both positive and negative persuasion spillovers, while the observed asymmetry points to a mechanism in which moral disagreement triggers identity-based distancing from the speaker.
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
The Civic Cost of Specialization