This chapter discusses the regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) from the vantage point of political economy, based on the following premises: (i) AI systems maximize a single, measurable objective. (ii) In society, different individuals have different objectives. AI systems generate...

We review the burgeoning literature on the economics of social media, which has become ubiquitous in the modern economy and fundamentally changed how people interact. We first define social media platforms and isolate the features that distinguish them from traditional media and other digital...

Morris and Shoub (2024) study whether fatal police shootings mobilize voter participation in presidential elections. They use a discontinuity-in-time design to causally estimate the effect of a police killing on turnout, comparing the voter participation of communities near a killing before and...

Industrial policies, such as infrastructure investments and export tariffs, affect the allocation of labor and incomes across sectors, attracting substantial lobbying efforts by special interest groups. Yet, the link between structural change and lobbying remains underexplored. Using more than...

Friedrich Hayek has been one of the dominating intellectual figures of the 20th century. Hayek, together with Gunnar Myrdal, received the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, for "their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the...

We study the causal effects of increasing the transparency of parliamentary speeches on polarization and other types of MP behavior. Our research design utilizes the 1989 introduction of TV broadcasting to those Finnish government's parliamentary question hours held on the first Thursday of...

We examine the relative importance of accuracy concerns and belief confirmation motives in driving the demand for news. In experiments with US voters, we first vary beliefs about whether an outlet reports the news in a right-wing biased, left-wing biased, or unbiased way. We then measure demand...

We study the long-term evolution of party demographics and the associated changes in parliamentary speech patterns of various within-party groups in Finland during 1907-2018. We find significant speech differences by gender and university education status, while other MP characteristics - age,...

We use novel data to describe the evolution of party differences in parliamentary speech in Finland during 1907-2018. We find a peak in left-right polarization in the 1970s, driven by the extreme left party, and co-occuring with a high prevalance of Soviet Union related phrases, perhaps...

Latin America is widely acknowledged as one of the most unequal regions of the world (Sánchez-Ancochea 2021). But it is also one of the most democratic, certainly as compared to other developing regions. These two facts seem difficult to reconcile. Both folk theories of democratic...