Published Research
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.
Working Papers
When Monetary Policy for Financial Stability Backfires, with Ali Uppal, Conditionally 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.
Divide and Diverge: Political Competition and the Organization of Conflict [pdf] [Online Appendix]
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.
The Division of Understanding: Specialization and Democratic Accountability [pdf]
Abstract: This paper studies how the organization of production shapes democratic accountability. I propose a model in which learning economies make specialization productively efficient: most workers perform one-domain tasks, while a small set of integrators with cross-domain knowledge keep the system coherent. When policy consequences span domains, integrators understand them better than specialists do. Electoral competition then tilts government policies toward integrators' interests, while low aggregate system knowledge weakens governance and reduces the fraction of public resources converted into citizen-valued services. Labor markets leave these civic margins unpriced, failing to internalize the political returns to system knowledge. Broadening specialists can therefore raise welfare relative to the market allocation. The model speaks to debates on liberal arts education and the effects of AI.
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.
Team Disagreement and Productive Persuasion [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.
In Progress
Polarizing Effects of Political Propaganda with Guido Tabellini