The Division of Understanding:
Specialization and Democratic Accountability
Abstract: I develop a model in which occupational knowledge links the organization of production to democratic performance. In production, specialized knowledge allows workers to perform narrow tasks efficiently, while cross-field knowledge allows coordinators to keep the system coherent. In politics, voters bring their occupational knowledge to the ballot. Voters lacking the relevant knowledge have difficulty distinguishing good policies from bad ones, relaxing the electoral pressure towards high-quality policymaking. I show that productive efficiency can sacrifice knowledge needed to understand cross-domain policies. Competitive markets reward knowledge for its productive contribution while leaving its political value unpriced; I identify when this externality creates over-specialization and show that its welfare cost can grow with policy complexity. When policies are in the common interest, I show that expanding coordinators' responsibilities can maximize welfare by increasing their employment share and voters' average policy understanding. When policies have redistributive consequences, broadening specialists' knowledge can instead be preferable: reducing inequality in policy understanding improves the allocation of public spending. I use the framework to study the political effects of technology shocks, showing how AI adoption at different layers of the organizational hierarchy affects welfare and when firms' incentives conflict with social efficiency.
Divide and Diverge:
Political Competition and the Organization of Conflict
Abstract: Why do politicians sharpen divisions when elections reward broad appeal? I model how two identical, office-motivated parties turn voter disagreement into partisan conflict. Elections allocate political power. Each party empowers its most valuable members first, so power has diminishing returns. Platforms never converge: differentiation builds constituencies that survive adverse popularity shocks. Voter polarization pushes platforms apart and benefits both parties—even when a voter group grows more hostile to one party. Across issues, parties divide along the direction that generates more voter conflict—for elliptical electorates, a leading principal component of voter positions, consistent with ANES survey evidence.
Published and Accepted Papers
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.
When Monetary Policy for Financial Stability Backfires, with Ali Uppal, Accepted, Journal of Economic Theory [pdf]
Abstract: We develop a model in which the central bank incorporates financial stability concerns into its monetary policy and communication decisions, while systemic banks strategically choose portfolios to influence policy. Because fully responding to economic shocks would generate policy surprises that threaten bank stability, the central bank underreacts to those shocks, consistent with the Federal Reserve’s response during the 2023 banking crisis. Anticipating this accommodation, banks tilt their portfolios to increase the financial-stability costs of rate hikes, pulling monetary policy toward lower rates while giving the central bank an incentive to announce higher future rates than it expects to set. Financial stability concerns can therefore backfire, creating a novel responsiveness–credibility trade-off: the more the central bank accommodates banks’ exposures ex post, the less credible its forward guidance becomes ex ante, making it harder for banks to align their portfolios with future policy and leaving them more exposed to policy surprises. Even when society values financial stability, it benefits from appointing a central banker who places less weight on it. Paradoxically, even banks may prefer such a central banker when the benefits of more credible guidance outweigh the loss of policy influence.
Working Papers
Team Disagreement and Productive Persuasion, Revise and Resubmit, Journal of Economic Theory, [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.
Disagreement Spillovers [pdf] [NEW slides]
Abstract: Political messages increasingly bundle economic policy arguments with moral social policy stances. Using survey experiments with roughly 6,500 U.S. adults, I show that such bundling sharply weakens economic persuasion among respondents who disagree with the social stance: support falls by 13–20 percentage points relative to when the same economic message is sent alone, sometimes moving below pre-message levels. Bundling an aligned social stance does not increase persuasion. The main results are not driven by party cues, generalize across policy pairs, and are largely one-directional from social to economic issues, consistent with the predictions of a model of identity-based distancing.
In Progress
Polarizing Effects of Political Propaganda with Guido Tabellini