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Title: Article-Level Slant and Polarization of News Consumption on Social Media

Abstract: There is widespread concern that the online news ecosystem produces polarized content and that extreme content gets further amplified through social media distribution channels. Methodological limitations in estimating content-based slant at the article level have made evaluating these claims difficult. We use data on the near universe (circa 1 million) of hard news articles published online by the top 100 U.S. news outlets in 2019, together with recent advances in natural language processing, to obtain a content-based measure of slant at the article level. Our main finding is that the degree of polarization in news consumption on social media is arguably high. Specifically, the mean slant difference between articles consumed by conservative and liberal users is 1.5 times the ideological distance between the average New York Times and Foxnews.com article. We also show that: i) the majority 65% of the variance in slant across articles arises within outlets, rather than across outlets, thus highlighting the importance of measuring slant at the article rather than the outlet level. ii) Most news produced is centrist, but the tails of the slant distribution are thick and there is substantial variation in slant across news type and topic. iii) Extreme content is much more likely to be shared widely on Facebook than moderate content. iv) There is substantial pro-attitudinal news consumption on Facebook even within the same outlet. v) Polarization in news exposure can account for the majority of polarization in news consumption on Facebook. vi) Echo chambers play an important role in driving polarized news consumption on Facebook.

Title: Pricing Novel Goods (joint work with Francesco Giovannoni)

The latest draft is available here:

Title: A general theory of tax-smoothing

Abstract: This paper extends the dynamic theory of optimal fiscal policy with a representative agent in several environments by using a generalized version of recursive preferences. I allow markets to be complete or incomplete and study optimal policy under commitment or discretion. The resulting theories are interpreted through the excess burden of taxation, a multiplier, whose evolution gives rise to different notions of ``tax-smoothing.'' Variants of a law of motion in terms of the inverse excess burden emerge when we allow for richer asset pricing implications through recursive preferences. I highlight a common unifying principle of taxation and debt issuance in all environments that revolves around interest rate manipulation: issue new debt and tax more in the future if this can lead to lower interest rates today.

The title of presentation will be: An experimental evaluation of the acceptability of meat taxes. Evidence from Denmark, Germany, Netherlands and the UK.

Short bio: Sanchayan Banerjee is an Associate Professor (Sr. Lecturer) in Economics and Public Policy at King鈥檚 College London. Before this, he was an Assistant Professor of Environmental Economics at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is a visiting fellow of the London School of Economics and Political Science and an affiliate of Amsterdam Sustainability Institute. His research focuses on developing citizen-oriented, participatory behavioural public policies and testing them in areas of food and energy policy, public health and charitable donations. He is an Editor of Behavioural Public Policy, an editorial member of Scientific Reports and PLOS One, and an Associated Editor of Humanities and Social Sciences Communications journals. He sits on the Steering Committee of the International Behavioural Public Policy Association. He is the founding chair and convener of Behavioural Transformations, an annual workshop of behavioural public policy for early career researchers. Sanchayan holds a PhD (2022) and MSc (2018) from the London School of Economics

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