Pinar Yildirim

Those of you who told us along the way that you liked the paper, your encouragement went a long way, thank you!

This paper remains one of my favorite papers. We fought to keep the model in the paper, and I believe it serves a unique purpose helping to measure heterogenous persuasive and dissuasive effects.

Hope you read and enjoy it, as we enjoyed working on it.

Moreover, even though news outlets prefer partisan content (and may be biased in how they report news) they do not look biased when it comes to the coverage of an Rep vs a Dem candidate (which is, to my knowledge, a novel finding in the literature).

These offsetting forces
moderate Democratic rhetoric, making Dems look relatively less extreme than the Republicans.

The estimates show that when Democrats take an extreme position, it is ~4X
more effective at mobilizing their base to turnout, compared to when Republicans take an extreme position.

At the same time, it provokes 2X the level of backlash from swing voters for Dems compared to Reps.

We measure the positions (set by the politician and reported by the news media) using texts from thousands of newspaper
stories and focus on the U.S. Senate races from 1980-2012.

We rely on our model and use instruments that exploit sports-driven crowding-out of political coverage in news media.

So how do the Republicans and the Democrats set their positions and experience gains/losses at each margin?

Depends on these elasticities at the turnout and swing voter margin.

If the politicians could choose, they would choose to take a partisan position with their core and a centrist position with the swing voters in private.

But as media collects and distributes information across the electorate, targeted and varied positioning becomes hard to achieve.

But it can turn also off centrist voters, resulting in a loss at the swing voter margin benefiting the opponent [“Dissuasive Effects”].

Choosing a centrist position instead can garner the support of the swing voters (stealing those votes away from the opponent).

Choosing an extreme position (in line with the position of the partisan core) and making statements as such can earn a politician the support of the core, resulting in a gain at the turnout margin [“Persuasive Effects”].

The idea in this paper required some explaining in the day, but not anymore: News media disciplines the speech of politicians.

Politicians choose positions/statements to get media attention towards (or away from) themselves and simultaneously try to get support from a heterogenous constituency.

Published, after years of writing/review:

“Persuasion and dissuasion in political campaigns: Communication and media coverage in senate races”

with Camilo Garcia Jimeno, one of my favorite people to work with.

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Looking forward!

20th Annual Bass FORMS Conference Call for Papers: 20th Annual Frank M. Bass UTD-FORMS Conference February 26-February 28, 2026 We invite you to take part in the 20th Annual Frank M. Bass Frontiers of Research in Marketing Science Con...

UTD-FORMS Conference is a great conference for academics in marketing, economics, and related fields to share recent research and get useful feedback. Happy to be in the scientific committee this year. Send us your best papers!

jindal.utdallas.edu/20th-annual-...

Thanks, @nber.org, for the post on our recent working paper.

Yes, we find AI can lower wage inequality within teams.

Details in the paper.

I need you to slow down another 30 seconds so we can run :)

@aviceisza.bsky.social is a friend I gained over years of NBER meetings, with conversations on organizational economics and running. One NBER morning we tried to run together and he quickly dusted me off in 6min miles. If Angelino runs for this role as he runs in real life, no one stands a chance!

This will be interesting to watch

It will take a while to make Philly’s incoming WNBA team profitable.

And, not surprisingly, what will take it to sustainability will be good marketing and financial planning rather than great athletic capacity in the long term. (Of course, we want that too!)

Good luck to Philly’s new WNBA team!

Despite the growth projections, most WNBA teams currently generate annual losses.

Tennis and golf remain the two most profitable women’s sports, mostly thanks to the media deals, corporate sponsorships, and ticket sales.

As one dives into the operational reality of bringing a team to a city, it becomes clear that involvement of an NBA team is beneficial because a venue is required, and this is a big investment for any new team.

So 5 WNBA teams are owned by NBA owners, and others have various collaborations.

— avg team valuation
$3.5b vs 55m

— avg viewership per game
1.6m vs 456K (across various media)

— avg ticket cost
$94 vs 47

Some interesting numbers from this undertaking were as follows (pls take them with a grain of salt, as most numbers came from personal interviews):

NBA vs WNBA:

— Avg salary of a player: $9.6m vs $120K/yr

— highest paid player:
$54m vs $235K

But the moment you walk into women’s sports, you realize how challenging it is for these teams to make it. They need to be financially sustainable and compete with men’s sports for media/advertising dollars, sponsorships, fandom, and venues.

Otherwise investments become donations for a cause.

Over the past few years, I advised a group of @wharton executive MBA women who were devoted to bringing WNBA to Philadelphia.

I hoped to contribute to the transformation of the city’s economy. And I played basketball in various teams growing up, so this was a personally rewarding activity.

It is great to be part of SICSS (Summer Institute in Computational Social Science) Penn 2025, which brings together researchers from various fields. If you are a PhD student or a young faculty attending, please reach out before or after the events.

sicss.io/2025/penn/pe...

The FCC has to consider viewpoint diversity for news media outlet mergers (for good reasons). But did we see other advertising holding companies subjected to viewpoint diversity? Should we treat media-buying ad companies as a force shaping the media industry? This is a new territory.

FTC's Daniel Guarnera says “Coordination among advertising agencies to suppress advertising spending on publications with disfavored political or ideological viewpoints threatens to distort not only competition between ad agencies, but also public discussion and debate.”

What is interesting about the FTC proposed order is its restrictions that prevent the parties from "engaging in collusion or coordination to direct advertising away from media publishers based on the publishers’ political or ideological viewpoints."

The FTC gave the green light for a merger between Omnicom Media Group and IPG Mediabrands, currently the third and the fourth largest advertising agencies, to form the largest global ad agency. How this merger will impact the advertising markets and media-buying behavior are to be seen.