Person:

Hojman, Daniel Andres

This paper provides a model of how media environments affect political polarization. We first develop a model of how media environments, characterized by their levels of accessibility and variety of content, interact with citizens' ideological views and attitudes and political motivation. We then embed it in a model of majoritarian electoral competition in which politicians react to those media-influenced views. We show how equilibrium polarization is affected by changes in the media environment, through two channels: the variety effect, whereby a decrease in media variety leads to convergence in citizens' views and hence to lower polarization; and the composition effect, whereby a lowering of barriers to media accessibility increases turnout and hence lowers polarization, since newly motivated voters are relatively more moderate. We take the model's predictions to the data, in the US context of the introduction of broadcast TV, in the 1940s and 1950s, and radio, in the 1920s and 1930s. We show that, consistent with the model's predictions, TV decreased polarization, and exposure to (network) radio was correlated with lower polarization. The evidence suggests that the variety effect was more important than the composition effect.

This paper introduces a family of multi-period poverty measures derived from commonly used static poverty measures. Our measures trade-off poverty levels and changes (gains and losses) over time, and are consistent with loss aversion. We characterize the partial ranking over income dynamics induced by these measures and use it in two empirical applications with longitudinal household level data. Comparing two decades of income dynamics in the United States, we find that the income dynamics of the 1990s-post Welfare reform dominates the income dynamics of the 1980s-pre Welfare reform. Next, we compare the contemporary income dynamics of three industrialized countries and conclude that United Kingdom dominates Germany and United States, and Germany dominates the United States if poverty stocks are given more importance than poverty flows. The differences between our ranking and those obtained using other welfare criteria such as social mobility suggest that our measures capture critical in formation about the evolution of poverty.