糖心TV

Title: Paying Not to Know: News Avoidance in Times of War

Abstract: Coverage of the ongoing Israel-Gaza war varies enormously across the two sides of the conflict and both sides hold sharply different beliefs about the facts of the conflict. We conduct a survey experiment in Israel and Jordan asking whether individuals avoid news about civilian victims from the opposing side, and how such news would affect them if they were to read them. We present several key findings. First, Israeli Jews and Jordanian Arabs are substantially less willing to read about outgroup victims compared to ingroup victims. Second, this tendency is driven less by instrumental considerations or universal affective factors, and more by social identification and group norms. Third, reading about outgroup victims increases knowledge, fosters empathy toward the outgroup, and affects policy positions. Fourth, these effects are as pronounced among individuals who typically would avoid such news. Together, these results suggest that avoidance of news about outgroup victims may lead to disagreements about facts and exacerbate hostile attitudes and conflict.

Title: A Probability Theorist鈥檚 Description of How God Plays with a Physicist鈥檚 Dice.

Title: Sowing Seeds of Mobility: The Uneven Impact of Land Reform (joint with Ting Chen, Jiajia Gu and Jin Wang)

Abstract: Barriers to labor mobility impede structural transformation. This paper explores the mobility barrier linked to land insecurity within China鈥檚 hukou system. Rural households face the risk of losing their land if they migrate. Using quasi-natural experiments of land reforms that increase land security, we show that the reforms have encouraged rural women to migrate away from agriculture at higher rates than men, increased joint spouse migration, but reduce urban women's employment rate relative to urban men. We develop and calibrate a two-region model that allows households to decide which members should migrate. The predicted impact of land reform is consistent with empirical findings on employment and migration patterns by gender. It highlights the importance of land reform on relative agricultural productivity.