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
  
  
• “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)

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 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.
  
  
• “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