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.

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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.

Title: Clash of generations: scramble for space amid rising income gaps

Title: Separation of Church and State Curricula? Examining Public and Religious Private School Textbooks (with Emileigh Harrison)

Abstract: Curricular materials not only impart knowledge but also instill values and shape collective memory. Growth in U.S. school choice programs has increased public funds directed to religious schools, but little is known about what is taught. We examine textbooks from public schools in Texas and California and from religious private and home schools, applying and improving upon artificial intelligence tools to measure topics, values, representation, and portrayal over time. Political polarization suggests a narrative of divergence, but our analysis reveals meaningful parallels between the public school collections overall, while religious textbooks differ notably, featuring less female representation, characters with lighter skin, more famous White individuals, and differential portrayal of topics such as evolution and religion. Important similarities, however, also emerge: for example, each collection portrays females in contexts that are more positive but less active and powerful than males, and depicts the U.S. founding era and slavery in similar contexts.

Title: The Social Construction of Race after Emancipation: US Census Racial Assignment Based on Skin Tone, Wealth, and Literacy (joint with Anjali Adukia and Daniel Keniston)

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Title: Pricing Novel Goods (joint work with Francesco Giovannoni)

The latest draft is available here: http://toomas.hinnosaar.net/novelgoods.pdf

Title: A general theory of tax-smoothing

Abstract: This paper extends the dynamic theory of optimal fiscal policy with a representative agent in several environments by using a generalized version of recursive preferences. I allow markets to be complete or incomplete and study optimal policy under commitment or discretion. The resulting theories are interpreted through the excess burden of taxation, a multiplier, whose evolution gives rise to different notions of ``tax-smoothing.'' Variants of a law of motion in terms of the inverse excess burden emerge when we allow for richer asset pricing implications through recursive preferences. I highlight a common unifying principle of taxation and debt issuance in all environments that revolves around interest rate manipulation: issue new debt and tax more in the future if this can lead to lower interest rates today.

The title of presentation will be: An experimental evaluation of the acceptability of meat taxes. Evidence from Denmark, Germany, Netherlands and the UK.

Short bio: Sanchayan Banerjee is an Associate Professor (Sr. Lecturer) in Economics and Public Policy at King’s College London. Before this, he was an Assistant Professor of Environmental Economics at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is a visiting fellow of the London School of Economics and Political Science and an affiliate of Amsterdam Sustainability Institute. His research focuses on developing citizen-oriented, participatory behavioural public policies and testing them in areas of food and energy policy, public health and charitable donations. He is an Editor of Behavioural Public Policy, an editorial member of Scientific Reports and PLOS One, and an Associated Editor of Humanities and Social Sciences Communications journals. He sits on the Steering Committee of the International Behavioural Public Policy Association. He is the founding chair and convener of Behavioural Transformations, an annual workshop of behavioural public policy for early career researchers. Sanchayan holds a PhD (2022) and MSc (2018) from the London School of Economics

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Title: Set-valued control functionsLink opens in a new window(with Sukjin Han)

Title: International Sourcing, Domestic Labour Costs, and Producer Prices (joint with M. Zanardi, Sussex)

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Title: Can democratic reforms promote political activism? Evidence from the Great Reform Act of 1832 (with Gabriel Leon-Ablan)

Abstract: Activists play a key role in the process of democratic transition and consolidation.

How is their activism affected by democratic reforms? We study how local activism responded to

the changes in representation introduced by Britain’s Great Reform Act. This reform

removed all parliamentary representation from some areas; other areas gained

representation for the first time. We exploit exogenous variation in which areas lost

and gained representation and measure activism using the number of petitions each area

sent to parliament. We find that petitioning increased in areas that gained representation,

partly because of greater civil society mobilization. We also find that petitioning fell in

areas that lost representation. This shows that pro-democratic reforms can promote political

activism, while anti-democratic reforms can decrease it. In the case of Britain, there

could have been positive feedback between activism and reform, making democratization a

path-dependent process and the Great Reform Act its critical juncture.