Short Bio & Research Activity
I am the Bernard T. Rocca Jr. Chair and Professor at the University of California, Berkeley Haas School of Business.
I am a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where I co-direct the NBER Political Economy Program. I am also a Fellow of the Econometric Society, of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, and of CESifo.
I am currently a Co-Editor at Econometrica.
Before joining UC Berkeley, I was a faculty member at the University of British Columbia and at the University of Chicago. I received my PhD in Economics from Harvard University.
My academic research primarily focuses on Political Economy and Applied Microeconomics broadly defined. I have worked on lobbying, regulation, housing markets, banking, political institutions and their design, elections and political campaigns, behavior in legislatures, and campaign finance. I have also worked on topics related to the political economy of development, corruption, patronage, ethnic politics, and intra-state conflict. I have interests in Finance, Development Economics, and Macroeconomics.
My teaching interests are in Political Economy, Applied Econometrics, Macroeconomics, and Data Science.
Recent Working Papers
Climate Politics in the United States (with Matilde Bombardini, Fred Finan, Nicolas Longuet-Marx, and Suresh Naidu)
Abstract
We study the effects of climate change and mitigation-related employment changes on U.S. politics. While Democratic vote shares rise with local climate exposure and respond to changes in “green” and “brown” employment, we find little response in candidate positioning on the environmental policy supply side. Embedding our estimates into an equilibrium political competition model, we project that, even under worst-case climate scenarios and current mitigation trajectories, congressional support for carbon pricing will increase moderately, by four votes by 2050. Our results suggest U.S. climate policy may be primarily constrained by candidate supply, not voter demand.
Decoupling Taste-Based versus Statistical Discrimination in Elections (with Amanda de Albuquerque, Fred Finan, Anubhav Jha, and Laura Karpuska)
Abstract
We present a methodology for decoupling taste-based versus statistical discrimination in political behavior. We combine a flexible empirical model of voting, featuring vertical and horizontal candidate differentiation in gender, ability, and policy positions, with a large-scale micro-targeted electoral experiment, aimed at increasing female candidate vote shares. Our structural econometric approach allows to separately identify preference parameters that drive taste-based discrimination and beliefs parameters that drive statistical discrimination via expectations about ability and policy positions of female politicians. Our application to Brazilian municipal elections uncovers substantial levels of taste-based and statistical discrimination. Counterfactual political campaigns show promise in reducing both.
Hard Facts or Cheap Talk? Strategic Communication and Policy Change in Regulatory Rulemaking (with Brad Hackinen, Giuseppe Carenini, and Jean Tirole)
Abstract
This paper presents a theory and an empirical investigation of strategic communication in rulemaking, the process through which government agencies make regulations. It highlights the different empirical implications of models based on hard (verifiable), soft (cheap), and hybrid information in shaping agency policy. Using hundreds of thousands of rules and millions of pages of public comments directed at regulatory agencies and recorded in a large U.S. government repository, we show that theories based on purely hard or purely soft information fail to match key moments in the data. Hybrid theories, based on combinations of hard and soft information, show promise.