Individuals of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) ancestry in the US have been targeted by anti-immigrant and counterterrorism policies and have been the focus of vitriolic political rhetoric. Despite this, lack of data identifying MENA individuals has prevented systematic evaluation of the...

We study cointegrating relationships among fiscal variables and output and use them to introduce a new measure of the government's fiscal position. In the US since World War II, we find that the primary surplus-GDP ratio and the government debt-GDP ratio are nonstationary, which invalidates...

This paper combines new data and a narrative approach to identify shocks to political pressure on the Federal Reserve. From archival records, I build a data set of personal interactions between U.S. Presidents and Fed officials between 1933 and 2016. Since personal interactions do not...

This study examines the rise of private health insurance in the United States in the post- World War II era. We investigate the role of the American Medical Association (AMA) which financed a campaign against National Health Insurance that was directed by the country's first political public...

We study the role of firms' political influence on the effectiveness of government spending using ARRA as a laboratory. Through an IV approach, we show that a 10 percentage points increase in the share of politically connected spending lowers the job creation effect of stimulus by 33 percent at...

We propose a general equilibrium model where two special interest groups (SIGs) compete to influence public opinion. Citizens with heterogeneous priors over a binary state of the world receive reports drawn from a continuous message space by a variety of sources. The two opposite SIGs attempt to...

This paper studies the manipulation of electoral maps by political parties, known as gerrymandering. At the core of our analysis is the recognition that districts must have the same population size but only voters matter for electoral incentives. Using a novel model of gerrymandering that allows...

We examine whether corporate money in politics benefits or hurts labor using the 2010 Supreme Court ruling Citizens United, which rendered bans on political election spending unconstitutional. In difference-in-difference analyses, affected states experience increases in both capital and labor...

Using friendship data from Facebook, we study the effects of three aspects of social capital on household financial behavior. We find that the most important measure of social capital in explaining stock market and saving participation is Economic Connectedness, defined as the fraction of one's...