Luca Braghieri
Luca Braghieri
Associate Professor
Department of Decision Sciences
Bocconi University
I am also affiliated with NHH, CEPR, CESifo, IGIER, and BELSS.
I am a board member of the Review of Economic Studies (REStud).
Most of my work is in political economy, with a focus on the media market.
Published Papers
Political Correctness, Social Image, and Information Transmission
American Economic Review, Vol. 114, No. 12, pp. 3877–3904, 2024
A prominent argument in the political correctness debate is that people feel pressure to publicly espouse sociopolitical views they do not privately hold, and that such misrepresentations might render public discourse less vibrant and informative. This paper formalizes the argument in terms of social image and evaluates it experimentally in the context of college campuses. The results show that (i) social image concerns drive a wedge between the sensitive sociopolitical attitudes that college students report in private and in public; (ii) public utterances are indeed less informative than private utterances; and (iii) information loss is exacerbated by (partial) audience naivete.
Civil Liberties in Times of Crisis
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Vol. 15, No. 4, pp. 389–421, 2023
We study people’s willingness to trade off civil liberties for increased health security in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic by deploying representative surveys involving around 550,000 responses across 15 countries. We document significant heterogeneity across groups in willingness to sacrifice rights: citizens disadvantaged by income, education, or race are less willing to sacrifice rights than their more advantaged peers in every country.
The Health of Democracies During the Pandemic: Results from a Randomized Survey Experiment
AEA Papers and Proceedings, Vol. 113, pp. 572–576, 2023
Concerns have been raised about the demise of democracy, possibly accelerated by pandemic-related restrictions. Using a survey experiment involving 8,206 respondents from 5 Western democracies, we find that subjects randomly exposed to information regarding civil liberties infringements undertaken by China and South Korea to contain COVID-19 became less willing to sacrifice rights and more worried about their long-term erosion.
Social Media and Mental Health
American Economic Review, Vol. 112, No. 11, pp. 3660–3693, 2022
We provide quasi-experimental estimates of the impact of social media on mental health by leveraging a unique natural experiment: the staggered introduction of Facebook across US colleges. Our analysis couples data on student mental health around the years of Facebook’s expansion with a generalized difference-in-differences empirical strategy. We find that the rollout of Facebook at a college had a negative impact on student mental health. It also increased the likelihood with which students reported experiencing impairments to academic performance due to poor mental health. Additional evidence on mechanisms suggests the results are due to Facebook fostering unfavorable social comparisons.
A Theory of Chosen Preferences
American Economic Review, Vol. 111, No. 2, pp. 720–754, 2021
We propose and develop a dynamic theory of endogenous preference formation in which people adopt worldviews that shape their judgments about their experiences. The framework highlights the role of mindset flexibility, a trait that determines the relative weights the decision-maker places on her current and anticipated worldviews when evaluating future outcomes. The theory generates rich behavioral dynamics, thereby illuminating a wide range of applications and providing potential explanations for a variety of observed phenomena.
The Welfare Effects of Social Media
American Economic Review, Vol. 110, No. 3, pp. 629–676, 2020
The rise of social media has provoked both optimism about potential societal benefits and concern about harms such as addiction, depression, and political polarization. In a randomized experiment, we find that deactivating Facebook for the four weeks before the 2018 US midterm election reduced online activity while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends. Deactivation also reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization, increased subjective well-being, and caused a large persistent reduction in post-experiment Facebook use.
Working Papers
Article-level Slant and Polarization in News Consumption on Social Media
Revise and Resubmit, American Economic Review, 2025
Threshold Disclosure in Collective Decisions
Working Paper, 2026
Frictions in News Consumption: Evidence from Social Media
Working Paper, 2026
Talking across the Aisle
Working Paper, 2025
Learning from the Past: How History Education Shapes Support for Extreme Ideology
Working Paper, 2025
Biased Decoding and the Foundations of Communication
CESifo Working Paper No. 10432, 2023
Work in Progress
Children and Smartphones (with Sarah Eichmeyer, Paolo Falco)
Children and Smartphones (with Sarah Eichmeyer, Matthew Gentzkow, Ruru Hoong, Angela Yuson Lee)
Disagreeing (with Francesco Bilotta, Collin Raymond, Mark Whitmeyer)
Laid to Rest
Targeted Advertising and Price Discrimination in Intermediated Online Markets
Democratic Institutions, Reciprocity, and Prosocial Behavior