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)

Shobhit Kulshreshtha (visiting PhD student from Tilburg University) will present  

Title: The Effect of Initial Location Assignment on Healthcare Utilization of Refugees

 Abstract: Characteristics of a place, such as healthcare access and the local environment, influence healthcare utilization. Refugees resettled in developed countries are often assigned locations based on the host country’s assignment policies, yet the impact of initial placement on their healthcare usage remains understudied. I use Dutch administrative data to examine the effect of conditions in the initial municipality on healthcare utilization of refugees, leveraging the random assignment of refugees. I show that 10% of the total variation in hospital visits among refugees can be explained by municipality effects. Additionally, being assigned to a municipality with a higher hospital visit rate among non-refugees increases a refugee’s probability of hospital visits. There is significant heterogeneity in the results for other measures, such as depression medication use and general practitioner costs. This study highlights the role of local healthcare access in shaping healthcare usage among refugees, contributing to policy debates aiming to provide separate and more targeted healthcare services for this vulnerable population at the municipality level.

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Title: Article-Level Slant and Polarization of News Consumption on Social Media

Abstract: There is widespread concern that the online news ecosystem produces polarized content and that extreme content gets further amplified through social media distribution channels. Methodological limitations in estimating content-based slant at the article level have made evaluating these claims difficult. We use data on the near universe (circa 1 million) of hard news articles published online by the top 100 U.S. news outlets in 2019, together with recent advances in natural language processing, to obtain a content-based measure of slant at the article level. Our main finding is that the degree of polarization in news consumption on social media is arguably high. Specifically, the mean slant difference between articles consumed by conservative and liberal users is 1.5 times the ideological distance between the average New York Times and Foxnews.com article. We also show that: i) the majority 65% of the variance in slant across articles arises within outlets, rather than across outlets, thus highlighting the importance of measuring slant at the article rather than the outlet level. ii) Most news produced is centrist, but the tails of the slant distribution are thick and there is substantial variation in slant across news type and topic. iii) Extreme content is much more likely to be shared widely on Facebook than moderate content. iv) There is substantial pro-attitudinal news consumption on Facebook even within the same outlet. v) Polarization in news exposure can account for the majority of polarization in news consumption on Facebook. vi) Echo chambers play an important role in driving polarized news consumption on Facebook.

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

Title: Conditional Rank-Rank Regression

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.

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Title: Self-Control and Attending Class

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Title: "Suez".

Abstract: For all its importance, we lack a comprehensive quantitative assessment of the Suez Canal’s opening in 1869. We find that it led to a 72% relative increase in bilateral exports for affected country pairs, potentially suggesting a 12% permanent increase in world trade. We also consider the composition of trade, finding that Suez led to large, concentrated changes in export shares and increased the extensive margin of exports. Finally, shipping cost calculations show that the relative cost of using steamships fell dramatically and immediately after 1869, pointing to a vital role for Suez in the diffusion of steam technology.