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
  
  
• “Political Metaphors in U.S. Governor Speeches” (with Dominik Stammbach)
  Latest version intitled “Figurative and Literal Language in U.S. Governor Speeches”, forthcoming in the Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics
  Abstract

  This paper examines figurative expressions, such as metaphors, and their association with emotional language in political rhetoric. We compare figurative and literal language employed by U.S. governors by applying a deep learning-based model to their State of the State speeches from 1995 to 2022. Predictions are clustered into nine socio-economic topics relevant to policy. We then document their use as part of strategic communication. Our results show that partisanship predicts the types of expressions used. Democratic governors are more likely to use highly figurative expressions when discussing environmental issues compared to their Republican counterparts. In contrast, Republicans use them relatively more when talking about moral values such as freedom and liberty. In addition, we show that figurative language on these topics is associated with more emotional language, with significant heterogeneity among them. These results suggest that figurative language may be used as emotional appeals to discuss key political issues.

Working papers

• “Does Emission Trading Deliver? Microdata Evidence on Abatement, Trading, and Innovation”
  (with Beat Hintermann, Corrado Di Maria and Maja Žarković)
  
  
• “Cost Pass-through, Productivity and Climate Policy in the German Manufacturing Sector”
  (with Beat Hintermann, Corrado Di Maria, Maja Žarković and Ulrich J. Wagner)
  
  
• “When Employment Sours, Do Elections Turn Bitter?” (single authored, available upon request)
  Abstract

  The tone of recent U.S. elections has been predominantly negative, raising concerns that politicians’ use of personal attacks and aggressive language is fueling anger, threatening the cohesion of society, and inciting violence. This paper investigates the role of economic hardship in driving negative political communication, using the China trade shock as a natural experiment affecting manufacturing unemployment in the United States. Leveraging unstructured data on televised political advertising from 2000 to 2022, 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 exposure to the China shock amplifies the use of political attacks only in ads favoring challenger candidates. A one standard deviation increase in import exposure raises the share of challenger airings containing at least one attack by about two percentage points for three election cycles, from 2008–2010 to 2016–2018. Moreover, the aim of attacks shifts from policy-focused critiques to personal attacks, with language becoming gradually more toxic. These findings suggest that economic hardship slowly steers electoral communication away from policy debate and toward more divisive rhetoric.

Work in progress

• “Echoes of Anger in Democracy: Independent Campaign Expenditures And Attack Ads in US Politics” (with Alois Stutzer and Patrick Balles)

Contributions to the United Nations regular budget

US State of the State transcripts, 1995–2022

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