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Examining Political Trustworthiness through Text-Based Measures of Ideology

Published in Proceedings of the 33rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2019

Classical NLP methods show how speech and voting records of U.S. senators differ in systematic ways.

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Discovery through Trial Balloons

Last updated 2022.

Exploring high-variance “trial balloon” projects can provide informational value even when they are ex-ante disliked.

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Persuasion with ambiguous receiver preferences

Published in Economic Theory, 2023

In Bayesian persuasion, a Sender with maxmin preferences linearizes the prior.

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Strategic Opinion-Writing on Appellate Courts

Last updated 2025. To be subsumed by the work in progress "A Structural Model of Opinion-Writing on Appellate Courts."

Partisanship causes more dissents on U.S. appellate courts, but those dissents do not always follow partisan lines.

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Delegation versus Cheap Talk: The Value of Commitment (with Jonathan Kastellec)

Does Party Affiliation Trump Appointing President? An Empirical Analysis of Trump’s Appellate Judges (with Jonathan Kastellec)

Submitted, 2026.

Trump-appointed appellate judges do not produce more conservative case outcomes than other Republican appointees, but they do cast more conservative votes from the bench.

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A Structural Model of Opinion-Writing on Appellate Courts

Persuasion and Dissent on the Courts of Appeals

Appealing to Large-Language-Model-as-Judge: Annotating and Analyzing the Universe of U.S. Appellate Opinions (with Jonathan Kastellec)

Submitted, 2026.

We show how to convert expert-written codebooks into machine-extractable facts, building a universe-level annotated database of published U.S. Courts of Appeals opinions (440,000 published opinions, 1892–2025) with human-level accuracy at 1/500th the cost of hand coding.

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