Matthew Gentzkow

Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election

Following the 2016 US presidential election, many have expressed concern about the effects of false stories (“fake news”), circulated largely through social media. We discuss th...

Media Bias and Reputation

A Bayesian consumer who is uncertain about the quality of an information source will infer that the source is of higher quality when its reports conform to the consumer's prior ...

Ideological Segregation Online and Offline *

We use individual and aggregate data to ask how the Internet is changing the ideological segregation of the American electorate. Focusing on online news consumption, offline new...

Persuasion: Empirical Evidence

We provide a selective survey of empirical evidence on the effects as well as the drivers of persuasive communication. We consider persuasion directed at consumers, voters, dono...

Polarization and public health: Partisan differences in social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic

Text as Data

An ever-increasing share of human interaction, communication, and culture is recorded as digital text. We provide an introduction to the use of text as an input to economic rese...