Measuring Group Differences in High-Dimensional Choices: Method and Application to Congressional Speech / Matthew Gentzkow, Jesse M. Shapiro, Matt Taddy.

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Gentzkow, Matthew

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Material type: Text

TextSeries: Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) ; no. w22423.Publication details: Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2016.Description: 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white)Subject(s):

D72 - Political Processes: Rent-Seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior

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Abstract: We study the problem of measuring group differences in choices when the dimensionality of the choice set is large. We show that standard approaches suffer from a severe finite-sample bias, and we propose an estimator that applies recent advances in machine learning to address this bias. We apply this method to measure trends in the partisanship of congressional speech from 1873 to 2016, defining partisanship to be the ease with which an observer could infer a congressperson's party from a single utterance. Our estimates imply that partisanship is far greater in recent years than in the past, and that it increased sharply in the early 1990s after remaining low and relatively constant over the preceding century.

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Item type	Home library	Collection	Call number	Status	Date due	Barcode	Item holds
Working Paper	Biblioteca Digital	Colección NBER	nber w22423 (Browse shelf(Opens below))	Not For Loan

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July 2016.

We study the problem of measuring group differences in choices when the dimensionality of the choice set is large. We show that standard approaches suffer from a severe finite-sample bias, and we propose an estimator that applies recent advances in machine learning to address this bias. We apply this method to measure trends in the partisanship of congressional speech from 1873 to 2016, defining partisanship to be the ease with which an observer could infer a congressperson's party from a single utterance. Our estimates imply that partisanship is far greater in recent years than in the past, and that it increased sharply in the early 1990s after remaining low and relatively constant over the preceding century.