Economics Insights @ CBS

Constituency mobilization is a widely prevalent corporate political strategy, yet we lack systematic evidence on the scope of its effectiveness. One emerging form of constituency mobilization is user mobilization, wherein a company focuses on rallying political support among its users. This approach differs from traditional lobbying, which relies on tightly controlled insider strategies to exert influence over lawmakers. In our study of user mobilization by platform-based companies in the U.S.

Policymakers increasingly rely on behavioral science in response to global challenges, such as climate change or global health crises. But applications of behavioral science face an important problem: Interventions often exert substantially different effects across contexts and individuals. We examine this heterogeneity for different paradigms that underlie many behavioral interventions. We study the paradigms in a series of five preregistered studies across one in-person and 10 online panels, with over 11,000 respondents in total.

Disagreement over divergent viewpoints seems like an ever-present feature of American life—but how common is debate and with whom do debates most often occur? In the present research, we theorize that the landscape of debate is distorted by social media and the salience of negativity present in high-profile spats. To understand the true landscape of debate, we conducted three studies (N = 2985) across online and lab samples.

We introduce a simple long-run aggregate demand and supply framework for evaluating long-run inflation. The framework illustrates how exogenous economic and political economy factors generate pressures that, in the presence of central bank discretion, can have an impact on long-run inflation as well as transitions between steady states. We use the analysis to provide a fresh perspective on the forces that drove global inflation downward over the past four decades.

We study the effects of competition by state-owned firms, leveraging the decentralized entry of public pharmacies to local markets in Chile. Public pharmacies sell the same drugs at a third of private pharmacy prices, because of stronger upstream bargaining and market power in the private sector, but are of lower quality. Public pharmacies induced market segmentation and price increases in the private sector, which benefited the switchers to the public option but harmed the stayers.