Abstract: This paper studies the supply and effects of causal rhetoric in U.S. politics. We define causal rhetoric as assigning responsibility for political outcomes, via claims of blame and merit. Training a supervised classifier, we detect causal rhetoric in over a decade of congressional tweets, finding that its supply has risen rapidly and pervasively, displacing affective messaging. We show that the production of causal rhetoric involves a trade-off between revenues and costs. First, quasi-random variation in Twitter adoption shows that blame increases small-donor revenues by expanding donor count, while merit raises average donation size. Second, fine-grained legislative data suggest that policy ownership determines relative costs: blame is cheaper for opponents, merit for proposers. Finally, causal rhetoric has downstream effects on societal outcomes, fostering protest activity and shaping polarization and institutional trust.

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.

Abstract: We develop a dynamic model of narrative-based political competition. Voters recall policy and outcome frequencies, but not their correlation, allowing for multiple causal accounts. Politicians exploit this limitation by crafting plausible narratives that inflate their policy's effectiveness. Plausibility disciplines rhetoric in a history-dependent way: the less a policy is implemented, the more optimistic the narrative. Equilibrium narratives take a merit-stealing/blame-shifting form and are maximally polarized. Incumbency erodes narrative advantage, producing endogenous policy cycles; in the long-run tenure is independent of true policy effectiveness. Results are robust to narratives induced by analogy-based expectations, preferences for truth-telling, and heterogeneous voter feedback.

Presentations: 16th UniTo-CCA PhD Workshop; 1st Political Economy Winter Workshop; UC Davis Microeconomic Theory Seminar; EEA-ESEM 2024 Rotterdam; XVIII GRASS Workshop Turin;  2025 Lisbon Meetings in Game Theory and Applications; 12th Bounded Rationality in Choice Conference; ESSET 2026.

Awarded Best Graduate Paper at 2025 Lisbon Meetings in Game Theory and Applications.

Abstract: This paper studies persuasion that operates through memory rather than through new information or reinterpretation of existing facts. I develop a theory-driven experiment grounded in a sender-receiver  framework, where a sender can strategically cue recall by re-reporting a past event. In a financial advice setting, participants learn about hypothetical firms through news items that combine a diagnostic signal with an uninformative context. I randomize which contexts accompany which signals, generating exogenous variation in the memory associations between signals and contexts. After a delay, an incentivized advisor strategically selects one past item to re-report to an investor, who then recalls information and forms beliefs. This design allows me to disentangle the extent to which persuasion can operate through memory—isolating a new channel of persuasion.

Recipient of the Behavioral Finance e.V. Research Grant 2025

Abstract: Biased, overly pessimistic beliefs represent an important obstacle to the adoption of cost-effective policy instruments, such as carbon taxes. With a large survey experiment, we investigate the effectiveness, on impact and over time, of information provision about the functioning of carbon taxes. We aim to simulate the potential of an actual information campaign, including interactions among peers about the content of the campaign. Such information campaigns are widely used in European countries. We focus on one of the few such countries without its own domestic carbon pricing scheme, Italy.

Presentations: Riederau Workshop on People’s Understanding of and Support for Economic Policies.