Economic Perception and Cable News: Evidence from Panel Data, 2016–2020
by Audrey S. Wang Abstract This paper employs a panel approach to investigate the role of partisan cable news in shaping economic perceptions using the VOTER Survey dataset (2016–2020) and sentiment-scored transcripts from Fox News, CNN and MSNBC, examining how sentiment and coverage intensity interact with individuals’ viewership patterns to affect macroeconomic assessments. Findings suggest […]
Reel Representation: The Economic Impact of Gender on Bollywood Box Office Revenue
by Sidharth Ravi Abstract The Hindi Film Industry, known as Bollywood, is seen as a gatekeeper of Indian culture. Annually thousands of films are produced, half a million workers across India are employed and millions in revenue is created. Although Bollywood has ensured increased employment and wage opportunities for women on and off screen, the […]
RadioWaves and Ballot Boxes: How Conservative Broadcasting Influenced Southern Electoral Behavior
by Ian Carlson Bailey Abstract This study examines how conservative talk radio influenced electoral behavior in the American South during the postwar era. Focusing on Carl McIntire’s “Twentieth Century Reformation Hour” program, I exploit exogenous variation in radio signal strength driven by topographical differences to identify causal effects on voting patterns. Using a novel dataset […]
The Press and Peace, Examining Iraq War Coverage in Newspapers using BERT LLMs
by Jakobe Bussey Abstract This study utilizes state-of-the-art BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) models to perform sentiment analysis on Wall Street Journal and New York Times articles about the Iraq War published between 2002 and 2012 and further categorize them using advanced unsupervised machine learning techniques. By utilizing statistical analysis and quartic regression models, […]
Bias in Fact Checking?: An Analysis of Partisan Trends Using PolitiFact Data
by Thomas A. Colicchio Abstract Fact checking is one of many tools that journalists use to combat the spread of fake news in American politics. Like much of the mainstream media, fact checkers have been criticized as having a left-wing bias. The efficacy of fact checking as a tool for promoting honesty in public discourse […]
Does Media Coverage of Sexual Assault Cases Cause Victims to Go to the Police? Evidence from FBI Data and Google Trends
By Harry Elworthy This paper investigates the effect that national news coverage of prominent sexual assaults has on the reporting decisions of sexual assault victims. Estimates are based on time series data of reports made to police stations in the US from 2008 to 2016 and Google Trends data of search volume, along with an […]
The Impact of Collegiate Athletic Success and Scandals on Admissions Applications
By William J. Battle-McDonald This paper examines how the quantity and quality of admissions applications to Division 1 colleges and universities were affected by two non-academic factors: (1) performance of a school’s men’s basketball and football teams; and (2) scandals associated with these athletic programs. Admissions data from 2001 – 2017 were compared to team […]
Structural Estimation of FCC Bidder Valuation
By Renhao Tan, Zachary Lim, and Jackie Xiao We modify a method introduced in Fox and Bajari (2013) which structurally estimates the deterministic component of bidder valuations in FCC spectrum auctions based on a pairwise stability condition: two bidders cannot exchange two licenses in a way that increases the sum of their valuations, and we […]
Increased Foreign Revenue Shares in the United States Film Industry: 2000 – 2014
By Victoria Lim The American film industry, which has historically been driven by the domestic market, now receives an increasing proportion of its revenue from abroad (foreign share). To determine the factors influencing this trend, this paper analyzed data from 11 countries of 2,337 American films released during 2000 – 2014. Both film and country attributes were analyzed to determine each attribute’s effect on foreign share, whether its effect size has changed over time and whether each attribute […]
Predicting Transfer Values in the English Premier League
By Dylan Newman This paper examines factors that affect the transfer value of players transferred into the English Premier League from 2009–2015. The analysis begins by examining what factors are significant in determining a player’s projected transfer fee based on the website Transfermarkt.com as well as the actual fee that the player was sold for. The paper […]
