Abstract: We develop a dynamic model of narrative-based political competition. Voters recall the frequency of policies and outcomes, but not their correlation. Politicians exploit such coarse memory by crafting plausible narratives that overstate their policy's effectiveness, reattributing outcomes to steal credit and shift blame. Because plausibility makes narrative optimism fall with policy implementation, incumbency erodes narrative advantage. This force generates endogenous policy cycles and, in the long run, makes tenure independent of true policy effectiveness. Extensions to analogy-based expectations, preferences for truth-telling, and heterogeneous voter feedback show how our mechanisms operate in richer settings that restore a role for policy effectiveness.

Presentations: 16th UniTo-CCA PhD Workshop, UC Davis Microeconomic Theory Seminar, EEA-ESEM 2024 Rotterdam, XVIII GRASS Workshop Turin, 2025 Lisbon Meetings in Game Theory and Applications, BRIC 2026, ESSET 2026

Abstract:  Democratic politics requires voters to infer how political actions map into outcomes, yet these causal links are often unclear, giving politicians scope to shape voters' causal accounts. This paper studies the supply and returns of causal rhetoric in politics: politicians' language linking political actions to outcomes through blame and credit. We fine-tune a language model to measure its use in 4.2 million congressional tweets spanning 2012-2023. Causal rhetoric is central to politicians' communication: it accounts for more than one third of tweets, is the language of political disagreement, and rises over time. The political returns of causal rhetoric are concentrated in blame. Combining campaign contributions with quasi-exogenous geographic variation in Twitter adoption, we find that exposure to blame has the largest effects on small donations. Using voting intentions from survey data and an event-study design around blame-only and credit-only days, we find that politicians' support rises after blame-only days. Finally, causal rhetoric appears rarely supported by economic knowledge, particularly blame.

Presentations:  Munich Workshop on Beliefs Narratives and Memory; 2nd Bocconi-CCA-Cornell Political Economy Workshop; Princeton Junior PE Seminar; Workshop on Text-as-Data in Economics at Lancaster; 2nd Verona Early Career Workshop in Economics; Potsdam Text-as-Data in Behavioral Economics Workshop; XIV Alghero IBEO Workshop; 1st Berlin Micro Theory and Behavioral Economics PhD Conference; 10th Monash-Paris-Warwick-Zurich-CEPR Text-As-Data Workshop; 1st CEPR Future of Democracy Conference at WZB; Ludwig Erhard ifo Research Workshop; 18th UniTo-CCA PhD Workshop in Economics; Applied Young Economist Webinar; XXIII RIDGE Political Economy Workshop; 9th Economics of Media Bias Workshop; AI and Society Conference; 2nd Berlin Applied Microeconomics PhD Conference, CREST-LMU-WZB Cognitive Economics Workshop.

Abstract: A designer relies on an experimenter to provide information to a decision maker, but the experimenter has incentives to persuade rather than merely transmit information. Anticipating this motive, the designer can restrict the set of admissible experiments, but cannot prevent the experimenter from garbling any admissible experiment. We model this situation as delegation over experiments. The optimal delegation set can be obtained by comparing maximally informative experiments among those the experimenter has no incentive to garble. When the experimenter's preferences are S-shaped, we fully characterize such experiments as double censorship. Relative to the full delegation outcome, upper censorship, double censorship features an intermediate pooling region, inducing a smaller pooling region for the highest states. We show that the designer strictly benefits from imposing a nontrivial delegation set to constrain the experimenter's ability to persuade while retaining valuable information provision. 

Presentations: University of Exeter, University of Bielefeld, Theros, Nordic Economic Theory Seminar, CSEF-IGIER Symposium on Economics and Institutions, EEA-ESEM 2026, EWMD 2026, Transatlantic Theory Workshop 2026

Abstract: We study joint decision-making when agents agree on all primitives other than signal likelihoods (i.e. they have different subjective Blackwell experiments). We characterize a measure of disagreement between decision-makers by considering signal-contingent plans which satisfy ex ante individual rationality for both agent relative to the prior-optimal outside option, uniformly across decision problems. We show our measure is prior-independent, and provide a linear test: inclusion holds if and only if each joint distribution is a convex combination of the other pair's. We then show that the unique complete, rotation-invariant extension is the cosine similarity of the two joint distributions. Applications show that greater agreement expands a normalized ex ante Pareto frontier and enlarges the set of single-model rationalizations. Our order is independent of Blackwell's and selects quadratic over KL-type Bregman divergences.

Presentations: University of Pennsylvania, RUD 2026, Barcelona Summer Forum 2026

Note:  Previously  part of "Coarse Memory and Plausible Narratives"

Abstract: How does policy implementation change the rhetoric elected officials use to connect policy to economic outcomes? We study Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, whose staggered state rollout changed the local policy environment facing members of the U.S. House. Linking implementation timing to 1.6 million tweets from 2012 to 2019, we measure insurance premium mentions and cross-party semantic similarity in ACA rhetoric within states. Before implementation, both parties linked the ACA to premiums, but with opposite valence. During implementation, however, supporters moved away from that link: Democrats reduced ACA--premium co-mentions by about 3.5 percentage points over two years, while Republicans did not; moreover, cross-party semantic similarity rose by about one-half of a standard deviation. These shifts occur even though the ACA reduced relative premium growth in expansion states. The evidence suggests that implementation can narrow supporters’ rhetorical possibilities even when a policy produces its intended outcomes.