arXiv 8 Mar 2025 · Econometrics · publishedThe Review of Economics and Statistics (2026)
arXiv:2503.06046 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text
Televised debates between presidential candidates are often regarded as the exemplar of persuasive communication. Yet, recent evidence from Le Pennec and Pons (2023) indicates that they may not sway voters as strongly as popular belief suggests. We revisit their findings through the lens of the persuasion rate and introduce a robust framework that does not require exogenous treatment, parallel trends, or credible instruments. Instead, we leverage plausible monotonicity assumptions to partially identify the persuasion rate and related parameters. Our results reaffirm that the sharp upper bounds on the persuasive effects of TV debates remain modest.
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The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.
| Reference | Intensity | Mentions | Sections | Main text | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Manski, Charles F and John V Pepper (2000) Monotone instrumental variables: With an application to the returns to schooling | 1.000 | 5 | 3 | 100% |
| 2 | Jun, Sung Jae and Sokbae Lee (2023) Identifying the effect of persuasion self | 0.956 | 8 | 5 | 88% |
| 3 | Jun, Sung Jae and Sokbae Lee (2024) b): Learning the Effect of Persuasion via Difference-In-Differences, ArXiv:2410.14871, available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.1… self | 0.941 | 6 | 4 | 83% |
| 4 | Pearl, Judea (1999) Probabilities of causation: three counterfactual interpretations and their identification | 0.874 | 5 | 2 | 100% |
| 5 | DellaVigna, Stefano and Ethan Kaplan (2007) The Fox News effect: Media bias and voting | 0.843 | 3 | 3 | 100% |
| 6 | DellaVigna, Stefano and Matthew Gentzkow (2010) Persuasion: empirical evidence | 0.843 | 3 | 3 | 100% |
| 7 | Le Pennec, Caroline and Vincent Pons (2023) How do Campaigns Shape Vote Choice? Multicountry Evidence from 62 Elections and 56 TV Debates | 0.737 | 5 | 3 | 40% |
| 8 | Stoye, Jörg (2009) More on Confidence Regions for Partially Identified Parameters | 0.737 | 4 | 2 | 75% |
| 9 | Tian, Jin and Judea Pearl (2000) Probabilities of causation: Bounds and identification | 0.737 | 4 | 2 | 75% |
| 10 | Possebom, Vitor and Flavio Riva (2025) Probability of Causation with Sample Selection: A Reanalysis of the Impacts of Jóvenes en Acción on Formality | 0.737 | 3 | 3 | 67% |
Showing the top 10 of 31 scored citations.