NBER Working Papers by Chun-Fang Chiang

When SARS struck Taiwan in the spring of 2003, many people feared that the disease would spread through the healthcare system. As a result, outpatient medical visits fell by over 30 percent in the course of a few weeks. This paper examines how both public information (SARS incidence reports) and private information (the behavior and opinions of peers) contributed to this public reaction. We identify social learning through a difference-in-difference strategy that compares long time community residents to recent arrivals, who are less socially connected. We find that people learned from both public and private sources during SARS. In a dynamic simulation based on the regressions, social learning substantially magnifes the response to SARS.

This paper investigates the relationship between media bias and the influence of the media on voting in the context of newspaper endorsements. We first develop a simple econometric model in which voters choose candidates under uncertainty and rely on endorsements from better informed sources. Newspapers are potentially biased in favor of one of the candidates and voters thus rationally account for the credibility of any endorsements. Our primary empirical finding is that endorsements are influential in the sense that voters are more likely to support the recommended candidate after publication of the endorsement. The degree of this influence, however, depends upon the credibility of the endorsement. In this way, endorsements for the Democratic candidate from left-leaning newspapers are les...