The effects of partisan media on political knowledge are theoretically ambiguous. Knowledge effects are important because of their close connection to welfare effects, but the existing empirical literature on knowledge is limited. We study the knowledge effects of the Fox News Channel. Following...

I present a model of affective polarization ("that both Republicans and Democrats increasingly dislike, even loathe, their opponents," Iyengar et al, 2012) via Bayesian inference. Two agents, representing the parties, repeatedly make policy choices. Each choice is based on a balance of concerns...

We use data from the Associated Press U.S. college football poll to analyze the ex-post optimality of social learning in a non-lab setting. The poll is a weekly subjective ranking of the top 25 teams, voted on by over 60 sports journalists. The aggregate ranks are publicly observable each week...

Opportunity cost is considered to be a fundamental concept in economics. But the definition of the term continues to be controversial. I describe how the term is widely used in two distinct ways, both in the academic and non-academic literatures. I propose a practical way for educators to...

The NBA provides an intriguing place to test for taste-based discrimination: referees and players are involved in repeated interactions in a high-pressure setting with referees making the type of split-second decisions that might allow implicit racial biases to manifest themselves. Moreover, the...

Using data on junior golf tournaments, we find evidence that the “hot hand” does exist, and that its prevalence decreases as golfers gain experience. This provides an explanation as to why studies that consider professional athletes conclude that the hot hand does not exist. We also show...

We used data on 20,000 ever-married adults in the General Social Survey to examine the relationship between watching pornographic films and various measures of marital well-being. We found that adults who had watched an X-rated movie in the past year were more likely to be divorced, more likely...

We examine how use of antidepressant medications is influenced by Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warnings about the increased risk of suicidality associated with pediatric antidepressant use. With individual-level data on antidepressant use from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, we...