Research

The Impact of Vaccine Misinformation: Evidence from the US (Download pdf) (AEA Poster Video)
The increasing amount of vaccine misinformation, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, has generated significant debate about the proper role of government and media platforms in combating it. However, little is known about whether and to what extent misinformation can actually change immunization behavior. This paper addresses this question by examining how parents responded to the unexpected surge in media coverage in 2007 of the verifiably false claim that the MMR vaccine caused autism. Specifically, I use a difference-in-differences approach to compare the vaccination rates of children whose parents were most and least likely to be affected by the coverage over time. Results indicate that susceptible parents were 3.3 percentage points less likely to vaccinate their children with an MMR shot by the recommended age of 15 months and 4.1 percentage points less likely to do so by 29 months.

The Impact of School Tracking and Peer Quality on Student Achievement: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Thailand (Download pdf)
A common educational practice around the world is to track students into classrooms based on ability. However, despite the popularity of tracking, relatively few papers directly identify the impact of being tracked into classrooms with higher- or lower- ability peers. This paper estimates the impact of being tracked into a classroom with higher-ability peers by using data from public middle schools in Thailand, where students are tracked into classrooms based on a preliminary exam taken before 7th grade. Importantly, all teachers, curriculum, and textbooks are identical throughout classrooms. To distinguish the impact of peers from confounding factors due to selection, I apply a regression discontinuity design (RDD) that compares the academic outcomes of students just above and below the threshold. Results indicate that significant increases in peer quality do not improve student GPA. This suggests that any gains due to tracking, at least in Asian contexts similar to this, are likely due to factors other than peer quality, such as curriculum or teacher quality.

Does It Matter Who Owns the Media? Evidence From Within-Market Media Ownership Consolidation (with Adam Bestenbostel— Download pdf)
Media ownership has become more concentrated in recent years, leading to concerns over media integrity and the nature of the information being passed on to the public. In this paper, we study the impact of broadcast television ownership consolidation on ideological preferences. To do so, we use a difference-in-differences design to examine the impact of within-market consolidation on election outcomes. Results show that within-market consolidation shifted vote share towards Democrats by 3-4 percentage points for both presidential and senate elections, and that this effect persists for at least 12 years.

Behind the Screens: Does the Coase Conjecture Hold Online? (with Catherine Eckel, Ryan Rholes, and Jesse Backstrom– Download pdf)
Online, peer-to-peer transactions proliferated with the advent of markets like Craigslist and Facebook. Yet, we know little about how the characteristics of these markets shape consumer behavior. We test the Coase Bargaining Theorem (CBT) in a computerized environment to study if these online markets introduce behavioral wedges that change bargaining outcomes relative to face-to-face markets. We establish a baseline test of CBT in a face-to-face setting by replicating Hoffman and Spitzer (1982, 1985) and then implement their protocols in a computerized setting where we vary the property rights assignment mechanism and whether subjects engage in repeated bargaining. We replicate the original findings of Hoffman and Spitzer and then find that efficiency decreases significantly, and that self-regarding behavior increases significantly, in the computerized environment relative to face-to-face bargaining. These results suggest that Coase’s theorem may lack predictive power whenever negotiating environments introduce behavior inputs into the bargaining process.