Publications

• “Cable News and COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake”, Scientific Reports (2022).
  With Christoph Goessmann and Matteo Pinna
  → Summary: VoxEU Column and Podcast
  → Media coverage: Bloomberg, The New York Times, The Washington Post, MSNBC, The Atlantic

Working papers

• “Political Metaphors in U.S. Governor Speeches” (with Dominik Stammbach)
  Latest version intitled “Figurative and Literal Language in U.S. Governor Speeches”, R&R at the Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics.
  
  
• “Carbon Abatement Costs in German Manufacturing” (with Beat Hintermann, Corrado Di Maria and Maja Žarković)
  
  
• The Effect of Climate Policy on Productivity and Cost Pass-Through in the German Manufacturing Sector (with Beat Hintermann, Corrado Di Maria, Maja Žarković and Ulrich J. Wagner)

Work in progress

• “When Employment Sours, Do Elections Turn Bitter?” (single authored)
  The tone of recent U.S. elections has been predominantly negative, raising concerns that politicians’ use of personal attacks and incivility is fueling anger, threatening the cohesion of society, and inciting violence. This paper investigates the role of economic hardship in driving negative communication strategies, using the China trade shock as a natural experiment on local manufacturing employment. Leveraging video data covering the universe of political advertising on TV from 2002 to 2020, I employ language models to recover transcripts and annotate them for the presence, intensity, and aim of attacks on political opponents. Results suggest that local unemployment amplifies the use of political attacks for ads favoring challenger candidates only, consistent with incumbents being portrayed as responsible for economic outcomes faced by the electorate. A one standard deviation increase in local unemployment between 1991 and 2011, which corresponds to a two percentage point increase in the mean unemployment rate, increases the share of challenger airings containing at least one attack (i.e., the extensive margin) by about four percentage points. The effect is strongest in the 2006-2008 election cycle, in which the intensive margin also increases by about one additional attack for every four such airings. Further results do not show any shift in the aim of attacks—whether toward policies or personal characteristics of the opponent—providing no evidence that higher unemployment reinforces the policy debate or diverts the attention away from candidates’ policies.
  
  
• “Echoes of Anger in Democracy: Independent Campaign Expenditures And Attack Ads in U.S. Politics” (with Alois Stutzer and Patrick Balles)

Contributions to the United Nations regular budget

U.S. State of the State transcripts

Economics of Public Policy

Every fall semester, Master level

Course catalog page

Seminars in Public and Environmental Economics

Bachelor (spring semester) and Master (fall semester) levels

Bachelor course catalog page – Master course catalog page

Introduction to Python programming

Every start of the semester, all levels

Course catalog page - GitHub repository