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 also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where I co-direct the NBER Political Economy Program. I am a Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research and of CESifo.
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 political institutions and their design, elections and political campaigns, behavior in legislatures, campaign finance, lobbying, regulation, housing markets, and banking. 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.
I am currently a Co-Editor at Econometrica.
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 on U.S. politics. We combine 2000-2020 precinct-level voting information and congressional candidate positions on environmental policy with high-resolution temperature and precipitation data and census-block level measures of ``green" and ``brown" employment shares. Holding politician positions fixed within a district, we find that Democratic vote share increases with exogenous changes in local climate and green transition employment. We incorporate these estimates into a structural model of political competition, including both direct and demand-driven effects of shocks on candidate policy platform supply. Incorporating our model estimates into 2025-2050 projections of climate change and green employment transition, we find that voting for the Democrats increases, even as both parties move slightly to the right on climate policy. Under worst-case climate projections and current mitigation trajectories, the median 2050 Congressperson has roughly the same environmental ideology as the median 2010 Democrat –for instance supporting carbon pricing.
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.