Jesse M. Shapiro

Many observers have forecast large partisan shifts in the US electorate based on demographic trends. Such forecasts are appealing because demographic trends are often predictable even over long horizons. We backtest demographic forecasts using data on US elections since 1952. We envision a...

We introduce a model in which a benevolent news outlet decides whether to report the realization of a state to a consumer, who pays a cost to receive it. A simple statistical rule, called a proper scoring rule, describes when the outlet should be more likely to report the realization. Using data...

A sender sends a signal about a state to a receiver who takes an action that determines a payoff. A moderator can block some or all of the sender's signal before it reaches the receiver. When the moderator's policy is transparent to the receiver, the moderator can improve the payoff by blocking...

We cast the problem of communicating scientific uncertainty as one of reporting a posterior distribution on an unknown parameter to an audience of Bayesian decision-makers. We establish novel bounds on the audiences regret when the analyst reports an approximation to a posterior that the audience...

A researcher can use a tightly parameterized structural model to obtain internally consistent estimates of a wide range of economically interesting targets. We ask how reliable these estimates are when the researchers model may be misspecified. We focus on the case of multivariate, potentially...

Existing theories of media competition imply that advertisers will pay a lower price in equilibrium to reach consumers who multi-home across competing outlets. We generalize, extend, and test this prediction. We find that television outlets whose viewers watch more television charge a lower price...

A repressive regime can suppress dissent (e.g., protest) after it manifests (e.g., by beating or arresting protesters) or prevent it beforehand (e.g., by obstructing public spaces). We separately study and measure these two forms of repression, focusing on the case of political protest. We show in a...

Linear panel models featuring unit and time fixed effects appear in many areas of empirical economics. An active literature studies the interpretation of the ordinary least squares estimator of the model, commonly called the two-way fixed effects (TWFE) estimator, in the presence of unmodeled...

We use administrative data from Sweden to study adherence to 63 medication-related guidelines. We compare the adherence of patients without personal access to medical expertise to that of patients with access, namely doctors and their close relatives. We estimate that observably similar patients...

Linear panel models, and the event-study plots that often accompany them, are popular tools for learning about policy effects. We discuss the construction of event-study plots and suggest ways to make them more informative. We examine the economic content of different possible identifying...

A large literature in cognitive science studies the puzzling Flynn effect of rising fluid intelligence (reasoning skill) in rich countries. We develop an economic model in which a cohorts mix of skills is determined by different skills relative returns in the labor market and by the technology for...

We study the problem of learning about the effect of one market-level variable (e.g., price) on another (e.g., quantity) in the presence of shocks to unobservables (e.g., preferences). We show that economic intuitions about the plausible size of the shocks can be informative about the parameter of...

We propose a positive model of empirical science in which an analyst makes a report to an audience after observing some data. Agents in the audience may differ in their beliefs or objectives, and may therefore update or act differently following a given report. We contrast the proposed model with a...

Negative feeling toward opposing political parties is up most sharply in the United States. It has also risen in Canada, Switzerland and New Zealand while falling elsewhere. A ffective polarization peoples negative feelings toward members of opposing political parties has been increasing in the...

We measure trends in affective polarization in twelve OECD countries over the past four decades. According to our baseline estimates, the US experienced the largest increase in polarization over this period. Five countries experienced a smaller increase in polarization. Six countries experienced a...

We propose a formal definition of transparency in empirical research and apply it to structural estimation in economics. We discuss how some existing practices can be understood as attempts to improve transparency, and we suggest ways to improve current practice, emphasizing approaches that impose a...

We use detailed data from a large retail panel to study the effect of participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) on the composition and nutrient content of foods purchased for at-home consumption. We find that the effect of SNAP participation is small relative to the cross...

We propose a way to formalize the relationship between descriptive analysis and structural estimation. A researcher reports an estimate of a structural quantity of interest c that is exactly or asymptotically unbiased under some base model. The researcher also reports descriptive statistics that...

We consider a linear panel event-study design in which unobserved confounds may be related both to the outcome and to the policy variable of interest. We provide sufficient conditions to identify the causal effect of the policy by exploiting covariates related to the policy only through the...

We combine nine previously proposed measures to construct an index of political polarization among US adults. We find that the growth in polarization in recent years is largest for the demographic groups least likely to use the internet and social media. For example, our overall index and eight of...

We use a novel retail panel with detailed transaction records to study the effect of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) on household spending. We use administrative data to motivate three approaches to causal inference. The marginal propensity to consume SNAP-eligible food (MPCF)...

We study the problem of measuring group differences in choices when the dimensionality of the choice set is large. We show that standard approaches suffer from a severe finite-sample bias, and we propose an estimator that applies recent advances in machine learning to address this bias. We apply...

News consumption is moving online. If this move fundamentally changes how news is produced and consumed it will have important ramifications for politics. In this chapter the authors formulate a model of the supply and demand of news online that is motivated by descriptive features of online news...

We propose a local measure of the relationship between parameter estimates and the moments of the data they depend on. Our measure can be computed at negligible cost even for complex structural models. We argue that reporting this measure can increase the transparency of structural estimates, making...

Better-informed consumers are less likely to pay more for national brands. Why are consumers willing to pay for a nationally advertised product when a store brand or generic of the same product may be had at one-third the price? In...

We estimate the effect of information and expertise on consumers willingness to pay for national brands in physically homogeneous product categories. In a detailed case study of headache remedies we find that more informed or expert consumers are less likely to pay extra to buy national brands, with...

We review the theoretical literature on market determinants of media bias. We present a theoretical framework that organizes many key themes in the literature, and discuss substantive lessons....

A journalist reports to a voter on an unknown, policy-relevant state. Competing special interests can make claims that contradict the facts but seem credible to the voter. A reputational incentive to avoid taking sides leads the journalist to report special interests claims to the voter. In...

News consumption is moving online. If this move fundamentally changes how news is produced and consumed it will have important ramifications for politics. In this chapter we formulate a model of the supply and demand of news online that is motivated by descriptive features of online news consumption...

In many traditional models of politics, such as the pioneering work of Anthony Downs, voters lack private incentives to become informed. 1 The news media therefore play a crucial role in any democracy, amortizing the costs of gathering and filtering news across many citizens, lowering the costs of...

When the price of gasoline increases... the market share of regular gasoline increases while the market share of higher quality gasoline falls. While conventional economic theory suggests that decisionmakers treat a dollar as a dollar no matter how it was earned or is to be spent, in practice some...

[In the 1920s] a 10 percentage point increase in the fraction of Republicans in a market also is correlated with a 23 percentage point increase in the probability that an entering newspaper chooses a Republican affiliation. In...

We study the competitive forces that shaped ideological diversity in the US press in the early twentieth century. We find that households preferred like-minded news and that newspapers used their political orientation to differentiate from competitors. We formulate a model of newspaper demand, entry...

We formulate a test of the fungibility of money based on parallel shifts in the prices of different quality grades of a commodity. We embed the test in a discrete-choice model of product quality choice and estimate the model using panel microdata on gasoline purchases. We find that when gasoline...

Using data from 1869 to 1928, we estimate the effect of party control of state governments on the entry, exit, circulation, prices, number of pages, and content of Republican and Democratic daily newspapers. We exploit changes over time in party control of the governorship and state legislatures in...

We use individual and aggregate data to ask how the Internet is changing the ideological segregation of the American electorate. Focusing on online news consumption, offline news consumption, and face-to-face social interactions, we define ideological segregation in each domain using standard...

We use new data on entries and exits of US daily newspapers from 1869 to 2004 to estimate effects on political participation, party vote shares, and electoral competitiveness. Our identification strategy exploits the precise timing of these events and allows for the possibility of confounding trends...

The controversy over whether and how much to charge for health products in the developing world rests, in part, on whether higher prices can increase use, either by targeting distribution to high-use households (a screening effect), or by stimulating use psychologically through a sunk-cost effect....

The ideology of the owners doesn't correlate in any significant way with the political slant of their newspapers' coverage. When a single owner owns multiple papers, the authors find that each paper's language is tailored to its own market, rather than toeing a single, corporate line. Diversity of...

Students who saw silent videos picked the right candidate 58 percent of the time, whereas those viewers who heard full sound or muddled sound were only right 52 and 48 percent of the time, respectively, no better than the results of random guessing. Forget the campaigns. Disregard the position...

We construct a new index of media slant that measures whether a news outlet.s language is more similar to that of a congressional Republican or Democrat. We apply the measure to study the market forces that determine political con- tent in the news. We estimate a model of newspaper demand that...

We showed 10-second, silent video clips of unfamiliar gubernatorial debates to a group of experimental participants and asked them to predict the election outcomes. The participants' predictions explain more than 20 percent of the variation in the actual two-party vote share across the 58 elections...

We use heterogeneity in the timing of television's introduction to different local markets to identify the effect of preschool television exposure on standardized test scores later in life. Our preferred point estimate indicates that an additional year of preschool television exposure raises average...

A Bayesian consumer who is uncertain about the quality of an information source will infer that the source is of higher quality when its reports conform to the consumer's prior expectations. We use this fact to build a model of media bias in which firms slant their reports toward the prior beliefs...

From 1940 to 1990, a 10 percent increase in a metropolitan area's concentration of college-educated residents was associated with a.8 percent increase in subsequent employment growth. Instrumental variables estimates support a causal relationship between college graduates and employment growth, but...

Party platforms differ sharply from one another, especially on issues with religious content, such as abortion or gay marriage. Religious extremism in the U.S. appears to be strategically targeted to win elections, since party platforms diverge significantly, while policy outcomes like abortion...

Americans have become considerably more obese over the past 25 years. This increase is primarily the result of consuming more calories. The increase in food consumption is itself the result of technological innovations which made it possible for food to be mass prepared far from the point of...

The home mortgage interest deduction creates incentives to buy more housing and to become a homeowner, and the case for the deduction rests on social benefits from housing consumption and homeownership. There is little evidence suggesting large externalities from the level of housing consumption,...

The home mortgage interest deduction creates incentives to buy more housing and to become a homeowner, and the case for the deduction rests on social benefits from housing consumption and homeownership. There is little evidence suggesting large externalities from the level of housing consumption,...

What impact will terrorism have on America's cities? Historically, large-scale violence has impacted cities in three ways. First, concentrations of people have an advantage in defending themselves from attackers, making cities more appealing in times of violence. Second, cities often make attractive...