What role do journalists play in determining the political slant of the news they produce? We develop a model where journalists and newspaper outlets contract over both slant and wages. The model implies a set of conditions under which we can consistently estimate the role of journalist...

We document trends in affective polarization during the coronavirus pandemic. In our main measure, affective polarization is relatively flat between July 2019 and February 2020, then falls significantly around the onset of the pandemic. Two other data sources show no evidence of an increase in...

We provide new evidence on the drivers of the early US coronavirus pandemic. We combine an epidemiological model of disease transmission with quasi-random variation arising from the timing of stay-at-home-orders to estimate the causal roles of policy interventions and voluntary social...

We document trends in affective polarization during the COVID-19 pandemic. In our main measure, affective polarization is relatively flat between July 2019 and February 2020, then falls significantly around the onset of the pandemic. Three of five other data sources display a similar downward...

We examine the impact of a new tool for digital repression—a daily tax on social media use in Uganda. Using a synthetic control framework and exploiting the exogenous timing of the tax induced by the legislative calendar, we estimate that the tax reduced the number of georeferenced Twitter...

We provide new evidence on the drivers of the early US coronavirus pandemic. We combine an epidemiological model of disease transmission with quasi-random variation arising from the timing of stay-at-home-orders to estimate the causal roles of policy interventions and voluntary social...

Using nearly one million images from the front page of news websites during the 2016 election period, I show how computer vision techniques can identify the faces of politicians across the images and measure the nonverbal emotional content expressed on each face. I find strong evidence for...

We study partisan differences in Americans' response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Political leaders and media outlets on the right and left have sent divergent messages about the severity of the crisis, which could impact the extent to which Republicans and Democrats engage in social distancing and...

We measure trends in affective polarization in nine OECD countries over the past four decades. The US experienced the largest increase in polarization over this period. Three countries experienced a smaller increase in polarization. Five countries experienced a decrease in polarization. These...