This paper asks whether history should change the way in which economists and economic historians think about populism. We use Müller's definition, according to which populism is 'an exclusionary form of identity politics, which is why it poses a threat to democracy'. We make three historical...

We study whether anger fuels the rise of populism. Anger as an emotion tends to act as a call to action against individuals or groups that are blamed for negative situations, making it conducive to voting for populist politicians. Using a unique dataset tracking emotions for a large sample of...

Analyses of self-reported-well-being (SWB) survey data may be confounded if people use response scales differently. We use calibration questions, designed to have the same objective answer across respondents, to measure dimensional (i.e., specific to an SWB dimension) and general (i.e., common...

How does lie detection constrain the potential for one person to persuade another to change her action? We consider a model of Bayesian persuasion in which the Receiver can detect lies with positive probability. We show that the Sender lies more when the lie detection probability increases. As...

Many, if not most, personalistic dictatorships end up with a disastrous decision such as Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union, Hirohito's government launching a war against the United States, or Putin's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Even if the decision is not ultimately fatal for the...

We study how beliefs about firm value respond to public information stemming from either public announcements or shareholder meetings. We focus on settings with homogeneous shareholders (i.e., agents with common preferences and opinions), where information is about which course of action is best...

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...

We analyze a model of political competition in which the elite forms endogenously to aggregate information and advise the uninformed median voter which candidate to choose. The median voter knows whether or not the endorsed candidate is biased toward the elites, but might still prefer the biased...

The FDA is responsible for the approval of new drugs, biological products and medical devices in the United States. As part of the approval process, the FDA relies on advisory committees, which provide independent advice from outside experts. We combine a structural approach with newly collected...

Collecting and analyzing panel data over the last four U.S. presidential elections, we study the drivers of self-reported happiness. We relate our empirical findings to existing models of elation, reference dependence, and belief formation. In addition to corroborating previous findings in the...