Job Market Paper
1. Black by Popular Demand: Media, Competition and the Evolution of a Social Norm Latest Draft
What role do economic incentives play in social change? This paper examines this question in the setting of Southern newspaper markets during the U.S. Civil Rights era, when activists launched a campaign to replace "Negro" with "Black." I introduce an original dataset created by digitising 58 million newspaper articles from 450 Southern newspapers (1960–1973) and 1964 newspaper circulation audits, yielding measures of newspaper–county circulation flows and local market competition. I show that the campaign constitutes widespread and exogenous shock to Southern newspapers choice of label, and that its use brought more affirmative and autonomous portrayals of Black individuals, consistent with the label’s intended meaning. Adoption varied systematically: outlets serving more racially conservative audiences were slower to adopt “Black.” Local market competition increased the elasticity of supply to ideological demand: accelerating diffusion where audiences were receptive, but reinforcing inertia where they were resistant. I also document variation in product differentiation patterns, highlighting that competition does not always promote pluralism. These effects are not explained by editorial ideology or ownership. Finally, local markets exposed to earlier newspaper adoption of “Black” saw faster growth in Black local officeholding, implying that local exposure to the new label increased the salience and social acceptance of Black leadership among predominantly White electorates. The findings reveal how market incentives shape both the diffusion of social movements and their translation into political power.
Working Papers
2. Vertical Governance of Online Speech: Evidence from Google’s Moderation Mandate Latest Draft
This paper shows that infrastructure providers can reshape online discourse by enforcing moderation through access-based leverage. Exploiting Google’s 2022 Play Store policy update in a triple-differences design across three alternative social media platforms, I find sharp and persistent declines in threatening content, especially among high-risk users. Politically sensitive narratives such as election denial also fell, highlighting how infrastructure-level enforcement can redefine the boundaries of online speech. I introduce a simple model of vertical governance to explain why distributors impose moderation requirements and why platforms choose either to comply or exit, clarifying the incentive trade-offs that underpin infrastructure-led enforcement.
3. The Political Effects of Threats to the Nation: Evidence from the Cuban Missile Crisis
(joint with Tommaso Colussi)
This project examines how voters and policymakers respond to external threats, focusing on the political and military consequences of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Using novel measures of local media exposure and exogenous variation in threat salience, we estimate the crisis’s impact on electoral participation, partisan support, congressional behavior, and military service.
Work in Progress
Media & Political
4. From the Pulpit to the Polls: The Electoral Consequences of Christian Talk Radio
This paper studies the political effects of Christian-conservative radio expansion in the United States. Using variation in radio signal strength driven by topography and station acquisitions, I link exposure to county-level voting records and evangelical presence. Greater exposure increased Republican vote share, especially in areas with larger evangelical populations, highlighting how deregulation enabled partisan religious media to shape electoral outcomes.
5. Editorial Bias: Evidence from Historical Newspapers
This paper explores editorial bias showing systematic differences in language choices when newspapers published the same wire articles.
Climate
6. Climate on the Move: How Migration Imports Beliefs on Climate Change
(joint with Matteo Pograxha)
This paper examines how climate shock-induced migration shapes the diffusion of climate change beliefs across international borders.
7. Selective Science: How Media Bias Shapes Climate Change Narratives
(joint with Matteo Pograxha)
This paper examines whether newspapers selectively cover climate science in ways that align with their audiences’ political priors, independent of article quality, shedding light on how media shape public perceptions of climate change.
AI
8. The Introduction and Reduction of Estimation Bias in AI Assisted Research
This paper explores how biases can affect LLM-assisted research and shows how methodological design can improve the reliability of AI-based textual analysis in the social sciences.
Development
9. When to baseline - The impact of lottery allocation household outcomes in a highly vulnerable setting
(joint with C. M. Fernandez, A. Guariso, M. Holmlund, T. Mitchell, and C. Newman.)
This paper examines whether public lottery allocation in field experiments affects survey outcomes, using evidence from villages in Niger.