Social scientists have become increasingly interested in how narratives -- the stories in fiction, politics, and life -- shape beliefs, behavior, and government policies. This paper provides an unsupervised method to quantify latent narrative structures in text documents. Our pipeline identifies...

Can machine learning support better governance? In the context of Brazilian municipalities, 2001-2012, we have access to detailed accounts of local budgets and audit data on the associated fiscal corruption. Using the budget variables as predictors, we train a tree-based gradient-boosted...

Partisan cable news broadcasts have a causal effect on the size and composition of budgets in U.S. localities. Utilizing channel positioning as an instrument for viewership, we show that exposure to the conservative Fox News Channel shrinks local government budgets, while liberal MSNBC enlarges...

Can machine learning support better governance? In the context of Brazilian municipalities, 2001-2012, we have access to detailed accounts of local budgets and audit data on the associated fiscal corruption. Using the budget variables as predictors, we train a tree-based gradient-boosted...

Can machine learning support better governance? In the context of Brazilian municipalities, 2001-2012, we have access to detailed accounts of local budgets and audit data on the associated fiscal corruption. Using the budget variables as predictors, we train a tree-based gradient-boosted...

Can machine learning support better governance? In the context of Brazilian municipalities, 2001-2012, we have access to detailed accounts of local budgets and audit data on the associated fiscal corruption. Using the budget variables as predictors, we train a tree-based gradient-boosted...

In the early weeks of the 2020 coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, Fox News Channel advanced a skeptical narrative that downplayed the risks posed by the virus. We find that this narrative had significant consequences: in localities with higher Fox News viewership — exogenous due to random...