Title: Bound Together: Racial Peer Effects and Caucus Control in the U.S. Congress

Abstract: This paper argues that MCs’ social groups and the norms of behavior that define them can powerfully constrain legislators’ behaviors. Guided by insights from scholarship on legislative organizations and identity politics, I test my argument using the case of Black MCs and the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). My main empirical strategy uses an original data set of committee hearing transcripts from 2007 to 2019 and a design that exploits members’ exposure to fellow Black MCs on their various committee assignments to uncover the impact of group pressures on CBC members. I show that the effect of serving on a committee with more co-ethnic legislators varies by a given MC’s type: Members that are more aligned with the interests of the CBC — those that are left-leaning and represent more-Black Congressional districts — participate more in committee hearings, and members that are less aligned participate less. I then show using a series of empirical tests and qualitative evidence drawing on eliteinterviews that this pattern of results is driven by in-group sanctions for behavior that is inconsistentwith caucus wishes. Together, the theory and findings shed light on the role of groups and their norms in shaping elite behavior and provide evidence for the contextual nature of legislative Black political behavior.

Title to be advised.

Title: Dissecting Structural Change in an Open Economy.

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Abstract -- This paper studies the role of trade and international borrowing in driving structural change. I decompose the change in manufacturing shares into contributions by sectoral expenditure shares, trade shares, and aggregate trade imbalances, and map these into structural primitives in a quantitative trade model with endogenous borrowing. Using data from twenty economies, I show that trade specialization and international borrowing explain 34% of the average change in the manufacturing share, half of the cross-country heterogeneity in the patterns of industrialization, half the dynamics in high-technology subsectors of manufacturing, and much of the China-driven deindustrialization and ‘miracle’ industrialization in South Korea.

Title: Memory Rehearsal and Belief Biases

Abstract: We rely on memory to form beliefs, but we also frequently revisit memories in conversation and private reflection. I show experimentally that such rehearsal of past experiences generates systematic belief biases. Participants are given a set of experiences and then randomized to have conversations about a subset of them, either ones that reflect well or poorly on them. Such rehearsal has large effects on which of the original experiences participants can recall a week later. Crucially, participants appear naive about rehearsal effects: they take what they remember at face value when later incentivized to form accurate beliefs about the full set of original experiences. Rehearsal therefore distorts not only future recall but also future beliefs. Participants also make rehearsal choices without regard to their later distortionary effects. Intrinsic preferences for thinking about certain experiences instead drive rehearsal choices and therefore belief biases: in particular, a preference to reflect on positive experiences unintentionally generates a positivity bias in future recall and beliefs. This mechanism provides a new non-strategic channel through which seemingly motivated beliefs arise and generates novel predictions in a range of economic domains.