杰西-夏皮罗 应用微观经济学家

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Jesse Shapiro
Applied Microeconomist | Class of 2021
Devising new frameworks of analysis to advance understanding of media bias, ideological polarization, and the efficacy of public policy interventions.


Portrait of Jesse Shapiro

Title
Applied Microeconomist
Affiliation
Department of Economics, Brown University
Location
Providence, Rhode Island
Age
41 at time of award
Area of Focus
Economics
Website
Brown University: Jesse Shapiro
Published September 28, 2021
ABOUT JESSE'S WORK
Jesse Shapiro is an applied microeconomist applying new frameworks of analysis to a variety of topics in social policy design and political communication. Assembling disparate pieces of evidence—qualitative and quantitative, historical and contemporary—and using tools such as game theory and textual analysis via machine learning, Shapiro has addressed subjects ranging from statistical methodology and public policy design to media incentives and disinformation on climate change.

Shapiro’s early work reflects his eclectic interests and the array of inventive approaches he employs, with papers on the rise of obesity, urban economics, and recidivism. In one study, Shapiro and a co-author investigated the effect of SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) on household spending. They mined surveys and records of nearly a half million households’ food purchases, finding that SNAP benefits lead to larger increases in food spending than would result from equivalent cash benefits. In a series of studies, Shapiro (and frequent collaborator Matthew Gentzkow) devised methods to disaggregate data on difficult-to-quantify concepts such as media bias, political partisanship, and ideological polarization. They created a measure of ideological slant using a text analysis algorithm to identify two- and three-word phrases that code as either Democratic or Republican, based on the frequency individual members of Congress used them in the congressional record over one year. How often these phrases appeared in news stories proved to be a reliable indicator of a newspaper’s ideological slant, and comparisons of newspapers’ ideology with geographic and electorate data showed a strong correlation between the papers’ and readerships’ political leanings. More recently, Shapiro and co-authors have used a similar method to measure congressional partisanship. Their analysis shows that partisanship in the language of politics remained relatively low and constant for a century, until a marked increase beginning in the 1990s.

Shapiro’s work in this area extends to the impact of media on public discourse, particularly online and social media. In a study of ideological segregation—that is, people choosing media sources and communities that share their prior views—Shapiro and Gentzkow compared online and offline news consumption and face-to-face interactions (within family, workplace, neighborhood, etc.). They demonstrated that while individuals’ online news sources tend to be more ideologically segregated than offline sources, face-to-face interactions have much higher ideological segregation than both online and offline media. Shapiro returned to this topic in light of the 2016 election and found that ideological polarization has increased the most among groups least likely to use the internet. His research suggests that social media had a more limited role in rising partisanship than widely believed. Focusing on a variety of important questions of our time, Shapiro is advancing our understanding of the efficacy of public policy interventions and clarifying the forces contributing to the increasingly entrenched political polarization of American communities.

BIOGRAPHY
Jesse Shapiro received an AB (2001), AM (2001), and PhD (2005) from Harvard University. Shapiro served as a fellow at the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory at the University of Chicago (2005–2007) and was on the faculty of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business (2007–2014). In 2014, Shapiro joined the Department of Economics at Brown University, where he is now the Eastman Professor of Political Economy. He was also a visiting professor at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research in 2019. His articles have been published in Quarterly Journal of Economics, PNAS, Econometrica, and PLOS One, among other such journals.



杰西-夏皮罗
应用微观经济学家｜2021级
设计新的分析框架，以促进对媒体偏见、意识形态分化和公共政策干预的有效性的理解。


杰西-夏皮罗的肖像

标题
应用微观经济学家
工作单位
布朗大学经济系
工作地点
普罗维登斯，罗得岛
年龄
获奖时41岁
重点领域
经济学
网站
布朗大学。杰西-夏皮罗
发表于2021年9月28日
关于杰西的工作
杰西-夏皮罗是一名应用微观经济学家，他将新的分析框架应用于社会政策设计和政治沟通的各种主题。夏皮罗将不同的证据--定性的和定量的、历史的和当代的--组合起来，并使用博弈论和通过机器学习进行文本分析等工具，处理从统计方法和公共政策设计到媒体激励和气候变化的虚假信息等主题。

夏皮罗的早期工作反映了他不拘一格的兴趣和他所采用的一系列创造性的方法，他的论文涉及肥胖症的兴起、城市经济学和累犯问题。在一项研究中，夏皮罗和一位合著者调查了SNAP（补充营养援助计划）对家庭支出的影响。他们对近50万个家庭的食品购买情况进行了调查和记录，发现SNAP福利导致的食品支出增长大于同等现金福利的增长。在一系列的研究中，夏皮罗（和经常合作的马修-根茨考）设计了一些方法来分解关于难以量化的概念的数据，如媒体偏见、政治党派和意识形态极化。他们创建了一个衡量意识形态倾向的方法，使用文本分析算法，根据一年来个别国会议员在国会记录中使用这些短语的频率，识别出编码为民主党或共和党的两字和三字短语。这些短语在新闻报道中出现的频率被证明是报纸意识形态倾向的一个可靠指标，而报纸的意识形态与地理和选民数据的比较表明，报纸和读者的政治倾向之间有很强的关联性。最近，夏皮罗和合著者使用了类似的方法来衡量国会党派性。他们的分析表明，政治语言中的党派性在一个世纪内保持相对较低的水平和稳定，直到1990年代开始明显增加。

夏皮罗在这一领域的工作延伸到媒体对公共话语的影响，特别是在线和社交媒体。在一项关于意识形态隔离的研究中，即人们选择与他们先前观点相同的媒体来源和社区，夏皮罗和根茨考比较了在线和离线新闻消费和面对面的互动（在家庭、工作场所、邻里等）。他们证明，虽然个人的在线新闻来源往往比离线来源更具有意识形态上的隔离性，但面对面互动的意识形态隔离性比在线和离线媒体都高得多。夏皮罗在2016年大选后再次回到这个话题，发现在最不可能使用互联网的群体中，意识形态的两极分化增加得最多。他的研究表明，社交媒体在党派性上升中的作用比人们普遍认为的更为有限。夏皮罗专注于我们这个时代的各种重要问题，正在推进我们对公共政策干预的有效性的理解，并澄清导致美国社区日益根深蒂固的政治两极化的力量。

个人简历
杰西-夏皮罗在哈佛大学获得学士（2001年）、硕士（2001年）和博士（2005年）学位。夏皮罗曾在芝加哥大学贝克尔芝加哥价格理论中心担任研究员（2005-2007），并在芝加哥大学布斯商学院任教（2007-2014）。2014年，夏皮罗加入布朗大学经济系，现在是该校政治经济学的伊士曼教授。2019年，他还是斯坦福经济政策研究所的访问教授。他的文章发表在《经济学季刊》、《PNAS》、《计量经济学》和《PLOS One》等杂志上。