Related papers: The Electoral Consequences of Natural Disasters: A…
Societies experience politically stable and unstable phases along history, whereas political power is usually passed to new elite groups by these changes. Structural dynamics of the elites in a society have been proposed to be one of the…
Urban flooding disrupts traffic networks, affecting the mobility and disrupting access of residents. Since flooding events are predicted to increase due to climate change, and given the criticality of traffic networks, understanding the…
News outlets, surveyors, and other organizations often conduct polls on social networks to gain insights into public opinion. Such a poll is typically started by someone on a social network who sends it to her friends. If a person…
Political polarization, fueled by public discourse and echo chambers, threatens the foundation of democratic elections. However, traditional one-dimensional opinion models -- assuming ``support for one party equals opposition to another''…
U.S. presidential elections are decided by the Electoral College, established in 1789, and designed to mitigate potential risks arising from the collusion of large groups of citizens. A statewide winner-take-all popular voting system for…
A core tension in the study of plurality elections is the clash between the classic Hotelling-Downs model, which predicts that two office-seeking candidates should position themselves at the median voter's policy, and the empirical…
Unemployment benefits in the US were extended by up to 73 weeks during the Great Recession. Equilibrium labor market theory indicates that extensions of benefit duration impact not only search decisions by job seekers but also job vacancy…
Disasters impact communities through interconnected social, spatial, and physical networks. Analyzing network dynamics is crucial for understanding resilience and recovery. We highlight six studies demonstrating how hazards and recovery…
Citizen-focused democratic processes where participants deliberate on alternatives and then vote to make the final decision are increasingly popular today. While the computational social choice literature has extensively investigated voting…
Judicial promotions shape the composition of higher courts, yet their determinants remain poorly understood. This paper examines promotion from U.S. District Courts to Courts of Appeals using a discrete-time hazard framework that models…
While a social event, such as a concert or a food festival, is a common experience to people, a natural disaster is experienced by a fewer individuals. The ordinary and common ground experience of social events could be therefore used to…
Natural disasters always have several effects on human lives. It is challenging for governments to tackle these incidents and to rebuild the economic, social and physical infrastructures and facilities with the available resources (mainly…
We study the effect of public tallies on online elections, in a setting where voting is costly and voters are allowed to strategically time their votes. The strategic importance of choosing \emph{when} to vote arises when votes are public,…
Economic hardships significantly affect public perception and voting intentions in general elections. The primary focus of my study is to capture the degree of influence that individual economic hardships have on their voting. I utilize the…
Natural hazards can considerably impact the overall society of a country. As some degree of public sector involvement is always necessary to deal with the consequences of natural disasters, central governments have increasingly invested in…
A major challenge in data-driven decision-making is accurate policy evaluation-i.e., guaranteeing that a learned decision-making policy achieves the promised benefits. A popular strategy is model-based policy evaluation, which estimates a…
In natural phenomena, data distributions often deviate from normality. One can think of cataclysms as a self-explanatory example: events that occur almost never, and at the same time are many standard deviations away from the common…
In recent years, scholars have raised concerns on the effects that unreliable news, or "fake news," has on our political sphere, and our democracy as a whole. For example, the propagation of fake news on social media is widely believed to…
Understanding political phenomena requires measuring the political preferences of society. We introduce a model based on mixtures of spatial voting models that infers the underlying distribution of political preferences of voters with only…
I study a recently proposed statistical model of earthquake dynamics that incorporates aging as a fundamental ingredient. The model is known to generate earthquake sequences that quantitatively reproduce the spatial and temporal clustering…