About Me

I am a 5th year PhD candidate in Economics at Stanford. I am interested in industrial organization and political economy, with particular interests in media and social networks. Along the way, I dabble in applied econometrics.

Working papers

The Political Content of College Courses

with Gideon Moore and Jacob Light

Abstract

We measure two dimensions of politics in college courses --- the amount of political content and its partisan orientation --- using course descriptions from nearly 1,000 U.S. colleges and universities over the past 25 years. Using a novel text-as-data method, we separate the amount of ''political content,'' the extent to which a course engages with topics salient to politics and public policy, from ''slant,'' the partisan direction of that content. Since 2000, the average course has 0.15 SD more political content and 0.13 SD more liberal slant. Changes are most pronounced in the tails of the distribution, particularly for slant, and are modest relative to persistent cross-field differences. Following instructors who move between institutions, we find that instructors account for just under half of cross-sectional differences in course political content and slant. Using enrollment data, we find students show no preference for liberal content before the 2010s; demand for liberal content rises over the following decade, peaks in 2020, and falls slightly thereafter.

SIEPR Working Paper

Non-Robustness of Diffusion Estimates On Networks With Measurement Error

with Arun G Chandrasekhar, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, Tyler McCormick and Jerry Wei

Abstract

Network diffusion models are used to study disease transmission, information spread, technology adoption, and other socio-economic processes. We show that estimates of these diffusions are highly non-robust to mismeasurement. First, even when the network is measured perfectly, small and local mismeasurement in the initial seed generates a large shift in the locations of the expected diffusion. Second, if instead the initial seed is known, even a vanishingly small share of missed links causes diffusion forecasts to be significant under-estimates. Forecast failure depends critically on the geometry of measurement error: we provide sufficient conditions for catastrophic failure when missing links bridge distant network regions (acting as shortcuts), and sufficient conditions for robustness when missing links are a uniformly, randomly thinned subset of the full network (preserving network structure). Such failures exist even when the basic reproductive number is consistently estimable. We explore difficulties implementing possible solutions and conduct simulations on synthetic and real networks.

(2nd Round Revise and Resubmit, Econometrica) Supplemental Material

Publications

Interacting Policies in Containing a Disease

with Arun G Chandrasekhar, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, and Matthew O Jackson

Abstract

Regional quarantine policies, in which a portion of a population surrounding infections is locked down, are an important tool to contain disease. However, jurisdictional governments-such as cities, counties, states, and countries-act with minimal coordination across borders. We show that a regional quarantine policy's effectiveness depends on whether 1) the network of interactions satisfies a growth balance condition, 2) infections have a short delay in detection, and 3) the government has control over and knowledge of the necessary parts of the network (no leakage of behaviors). As these conditions generally fail to be satisfied, especially when interactions cross borders, we show that substantial improvements are possible if governments are outward looking and proactive: triggering quarantines in reaction to neighbors' infection rates, in some cases even before infections are detected internally. We also show that even a few lax governments-those that wait for nontrivial internal infection rates before quarantining-impose substantial costs on the whole system. Our results illustrate the importance of understanding contagion across policy borders and offer a starting point in designing proactive policies for decentralized jurisdictions.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (May, 2021): vol. 118 no. 19 doi:10.1073/pnas.2021520118. Supplemental Material, Code

Work in progress

Access Journalism: Theory and Evidence from Coverage of Politics

Learning-by-Doing and the Life Cycle of Innovation

with Gideon Moore and Janet Stefanov

Proximal Production Functions

with Jiafeng Chen and Sarah Vicol