We study how news coverage of immigrant criminality impacted municipality-level votes in the November 2009 “minaret ban” referendum in Switzerland. The campaign, successfully led by the populist Swiss People's Party, played aggressively on fears of Muslim immigration and linked Islam with...

We propose and implement a procedure to dynamically hedge climate change risk. To create our hedge target, we extract innovations from climate news series that we construct through textual analysis of high-dimensional data on newspaper coverage of climate change. We then use a mimicking...

We propose and implement a procedure to dynamically hedge climate change risk. To create our hedge target, we extract innovations in climate news series that we construct through textual analysis of high-dimensional data on newspaper coverage of climate change. We then use a mimicking-portfolio...

Media censorship is prevalent in autocratic regimes, but little is known about how and why censorship might vary within a country. I collect close to 40,000 articles from Chinese newspapers about officials caught during Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign, which is campaign widely publicised...

How should information be disseminated to large populations? The options include broadcasts (e.g., via mass media) and informing a small number of "seeds" who then spread the message. While it may seem natural to try to reach the maximum number of people from the beginning, we show,...