We measure trends in affective polarization in twelve OECD countries over the past four decades. According to our baseline estimates, the United States experienced the largest increase in polarization over this period. Five countries experienced a smaller increase in polarization. Six countries experienced a decrease in polarization. We relate trends in polarization to trends in potential explanatory factors.

This paper reports measures of preference parameters relating to risk tolerance, time preference, and intertemporal substitution. These measures are based on survey responses to hypothetical situations constructed using an economic theorist's concept of the underlying parameters. The individual measures of preference parameters display heterogeneity. Estimated risk tolerance and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution are essentially uncorrelated across individuals. Measured risk tolerance is positively related to risky behaviors, including smoking, drinking, failing to have insurance, and holding stocks rather than Treasury bills. These relationships are both statistically and quantitatively significant, although measured risk tolerance explains only a small fraction of the variation of the studied behaviors.

We consider a linear panel event-study design in which unobserved confounds may be related both to the outcome and to the policy variable of interest. We provide sufficient conditions to identify the causal effect of the policy by exploiting covariates related to the policy only through the confounds. Our model implies a set of moment equations that are linear in parameters. The effect of the policy can be estimated by 2SLS, and causal inference is valid even when endogeneity leads to pre-event trends (“pre-trends”) in the outcome. Alternative approaches perform poorly in our simulations. (JEL C23, C26)

We study the competitive forces which shaped ideological diversity in the US press in the early twentieth century. We find that households preferred like-minded news and that newspapers used their political orientation to differentiate from competitors. We formulate a model of newspaper demand, entry, and political affiliation choice in which newspapers compete for both readers and advertisers. We use a combination of estimation and calibration to identify the model's parameters from novel data on newspaper circulation, costs, and revenues. The estimated model implies that competition enhances ideological diversity, that the market undersupplies diversity, and that optimal competition policy requires accounting for the two-sidedness of the news market. (JEL D72, K21, L13, L41, L82, N42, N72)

We use new data on entries and exits of US daily newspapers from 1869 to 2004 to estimate effects on political participation, party vote shares, and electoral competitiveness. Our identification strategy exploits the precise timing of these events and allows for the possibility of confounding trends. We focus our analysis on the years 1869– 1928, and we use the remaining years of data to look at changes over time. We find that newspapers have a robust positive effect on political participation, with one additional newspaper increasing both presidential and congressional turnout by approximately 0.3 percentage points. Newspaper competition is not a key driver of turnout: our effect is driven mainly by the first newspaper in a market, and the effect of a second or third paper is significantly smaller. The effect on presidential turnout diminishes after the introduction of radio and television, while the estimated effect on congressional turnout remains similar up to recent years. We find no evidence that partisan newspapers affect party vote shares, with confidence intervals that rule out even moderate-sized effects. We find no clear evidence that newspapers systematically help or hurt incumbents. (JEL D72, L11, L82, N41, N42, N81, N82)

We estimate the effect of information and expertise on consumers’ willingness to pay for national brands in physically homogeneous product categories. In a detailed case study of headache remedies, we find that more informed or expert consumers are less likely to pay extra to buy national brands, with pharmacists choosing them over store brands only 9 percent of the time, compared to 26 percent of the time for the average consumer. In a similar case study of pantry staples such as salt and sugar, we show that chefs devote 12 percentage points less of their purchases to national brands than demographically similar nonchefs. We extend our analysis to cover 50 retail health categories and 241 food and drink categories. The results suggest that misinformation and related consumer mistakes explain a sizable share of the brand premium for health products, and a much smaller share for most food and drink products. We tie our estimates together using a stylized model of demand and pricing.