Working Papers

Working Papers

Media Misinformation and Childhood Vaccination

with O. Hauser and D. Rinaldo

In 1998, The Lancet published an article that erroneously linked the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism. A media scare questioning the safety of the MMR vaccine followed. To analyze the effects of exposure to different reporting during this scare, we exploit exogenous variation in newspaper readership caused by the boycott of The Sun (England’s most widely read newspaper) in Liverpool. Using difference-in-differences and synthetic methods, we find that MMR vaccination rates fell 20% less in Liverpool compared to similar health authorities after the media scare. To analyze the reporting of newspapers around the time of the scare, we train word-embedding models on a corpus of newspaper articles. When compared to the most widely read newspaper in Liverpool after the boycott, The Sun’s reporting was more likely to drive fears about the vaccine, even when fraud surrounding the original Lancet paper became a major news story. In line with the natural language processing analysis, the differences in vaccination rates are largest for cohorts of children due to be vaccinated just after major events in the MMR scandal.

Closing the Gender Gap in Re-Applications for Senior Roles

with I. Bohnet, H.-Y. Chai, O. Hauser, and K. Louw
Reject & Resubmit at Management Science

Strategy of the Commons: Causal Evidence from a Lottery in Parliament

with C. Powell


Works in Progress