Coming Apart? Cultural Distances in the United States over Time

Bertrand, Marianne; Kamenica, Emir

doi:10.3386/w24771

Cited by 76 publications

(50 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…According to Pew Research Center (2017), party identification is now a more significant predictor of Americans' fundamental political values than any other social or demographic divide, including gender, race, education, and religion. Similarly, Bertrand and Kamenica (2018) find that differences in social attitudes by political ideology have increased in the U.S. since the 1970s, whereas they did not find a similar increase in differences across gender or race. Moreover, a growing literature, described in detail below, documents the importance of political partisanship as af predictive variable for the economic expectations of U.S. households.…”

Section: Motivation and Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 85%

Partisan Professionals: Evidence from Credit Rating Analysts

Kempf¹,

Tsoutsoura²

2018

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Partisan perception affects the actions of professionals in the financial sector. Using a novel dataset linking credit rating analysts to party affiliations from voter records, we show that analysts who are not affiliated with the U.S. president's party downward-adjust corporate credit ratings more frequently. By comparing analysts with different party affiliations covering the same firm in the same quarter, we ensure that differences in firm fundamentals cannot explain the results. We also find a sharp divergence in the rating actions of Democratic and Republican analysts around the 2016 presidential election. Our results show analysts' partisan perception has sizable price effects on rated firms and may influence firms' investment policies.

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Section: Motivation and Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 85%

Partisan Professionals: Evidence from Credit Rating Analysts

Kempf¹,

Tsoutsoura²

2018

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“…I n many settings , researchers seek to measure differences in the choices made by different groups, and the way such differences evolve over time. Examples include measuring the extent of racial segregation in residential choices (Reardon and Firebaugh ()), of partisanship in digital media consumption (Gentzkow and Shapiro (), Flaxman, Goel, and Rao ()), of geographic differences in treatment choices of physicians (Chandra, Cutler, and Song ()), and of differences between demographic groups in survey responses (Bertrand and Kamenica ()). We consider the problem of measuring such differences in settings where the dimensionality of the choice set is large—that is, where the number of possible choices is large relative to the number of actual choices observed.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring Group Differences in High‐Dimensional Choices: Method and Application to Congressional Speech

Gentzkow¹,

Shapiro²,

Taddy

2019

ECTA

308

213

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We study the problem of measuring group differences in choices when the dimensionality of the choice set is large. We show that standard approaches suffer from a severe finite‐sample bias, and we propose an estimator that applies recent advances in machine learning to address this bias. We apply this method to measure trends in the partisanship of congressional speech from 1873 to 2016, defining partisanship to be the ease with which an observer could infer a congressperson's party from a single utterance. Our estimates imply that partisanship is far greater in recent years than in the past, and that it increased sharply in the early 1990s after remaining low and relatively constant over the preceding century.

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“…In this sense, the analysis follows a strategy similar to that ofAlsan and Wanamaker (2017) that uses the timing (July 1972) of the public revelation of the unethical Tuskegee (syphilis) experiment conducted by the US Public Health Service between 1932 and 1972, as a treatment on black men's trust of the medical system.5 Interestingly, bothDesmet and Wacziarg (2019) andBertrand and Kamenica (2018) show, using data from the GSS, that differences in social attitudes by political ideology have increased over the last four decades, widening especially in the '90s.…”

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confidence: 99%

Coming out in America: AIDS, Politics, and Cultural Change

Fernández¹,

Parsa²,

Viarengo³

2019

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Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. The IZA Institute of Labor Economics is an independent economic research institute that conducts research in labor economics and offers evidence-based policy advice on labor market issues. Supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation, IZA runs the world's largest network of economists, whose research aims to provide answers to the global labor market challenges of our time. Our key objective is to build bridges between academic research, policymakers and society. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.

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Coming Apart? Cultural Distances in the United States over Time

Cited by 76 publications

References 22 publications

Partisan Professionals: Evidence from Credit Rating Analysts

Partisan Professionals: Evidence from Credit Rating Analysts

Measuring Group Differences in High‐Dimensional Choices: Method and Application to Congressional Speech

Coming out in America: AIDS, Politics, and Cultural Change

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