arXiv subjects

Giampaolo Bonomi

Publications and source records attributed to Giampaolo Bonomi.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

The Division of Understanding: Specialization and Democratic Accountability

I develop a model in which occupational knowledge links the organization of production to democratic performance. In production, specialized knowledge allows workers to perform narrow tasks efficiently, while cross-field knowledge allows coordinators to keep the system coherent. In politics, voters bring their occupational knowledge to the ballot. Voters lacking the relevant knowledge have difficulty distinguishing good policies from bad ones, relaxing the electoral pressure towards high-quality policymaking. I show that productive efficiency can sacrifice knowledge needed to understand cross-domain policies. Competitive markets reward knowledge for its productive contribution while leaving its political value unpriced; I identify when this externality creates over-specialization and show that its welfare cost can grow with policy complexity. When policies are in the common interest, I show that expanding coordinators' responsibilities can maximize welfare by increasing their employment share and voters' average policy understanding. When policies have redistributive consequences, broadening specialists' knowledge can instead be preferable: reducing inequality in policy understanding improves the allocation of public spending. I use the framework to study the political effects of technology shocks, showing how AI adoption at different layers of the organizational hierarchy affects welfare and when firms' incentives conflict with social efficiency.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2026

Divide and Diverge: Political Competition and the Organization of Conflict

Why do politicians sharpen divisions when elections reward broad appeal? I model how two identical, office-motivated parties turn voter disagreement into partisan conflict. Elections allocate political power. Each party empowers its most valuable members first, so power has diminishing returns. Platforms never converge: differentiation builds constituencies that survive adverse popularity shocks. Voter polarization pushes platforms apart and benefits both parties--even when a voter group grows more hostile to one party. Across issues, parties divide along the direction that generates more voter conflict--for elliptical electorates, a leading principal component of voter positions, consistent with ANES survey evidence.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2026

Disagreement Spillovers

Political messages increasingly bundle economic policy arguments with moral social policy stances. Using survey experiments with roughly 6,500 U.S. adults, I show that such bundling sharply weakens economic persuasion among respondents who disagree with the social stance: support falls by 13-20 percentage points relative to when the same economic message is sent alone, sometimes moving below pre-message levels. Bundling an aligned social stance does not increase persuasion. The main results are not driven by party cues, generalize across policy pairs, and are largely one-directional from social to economic issues, consistent with the predictions of a model of identity-based distancing.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2026

Team Disagreement and Productive Persuasion

We study how open disagreement influences team performance in a dynamic production game. Team members can hold different priors about the productivity of the available production technologies. Initial beliefs are common knowledge and updated based on observed production outcomes. We show that when only one technology is available, a player works harder early on when her coworkers are initially more pessimistic about the technology's productivity. Holding average team optimism constant, this force implies that a team's expected output increases in the degree of disagreement of its members. A manager with the task of forming two-member teams from a large workforce maximizes total expected output by matching coworkers' beliefs in a negative assortative way. When alternative, equally good, production technologies are available, a disagreeing team outperforms any like-minded team in terms of average output and team members' welfare.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2024

The Disagreement Dividend

We study how disagreement influences team performance in a dynamic game with positive production externalities. Players can hold different views about the productivity of the available production technologies. This disagreement results in different technology and effort choices -- "optimistic" views induce higher effort than "skeptical" views. Views are changed when falsified by evidence. With a single technology available, optimists exert more effort early on if the team also includes skeptics. With sufficiently strong externalities, a disagreeing team produces, on average, more than any like-minded team. With multiple technologies, disagreement over which technology works best motivates everyone to exert more effort.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2024

Kites and Quails: Monetary Policy and Communication with Strategic Financial Markets

We propose a model to study the consequences of including financial stability among the central bank's objectives when market players are strategic, and surprises compromise their stability. In this setup, central banks underreact to economic shocks, a prediction consistent with the Federal Reserve's behavior during the 2023 banking crisis. Moreover, policymakers' stability concerns bias investors' choices, inducing inefficiency. If the central bank has private information about its policy intentions, the equilibrium forward guidance entails an information loss, highlighting a trade-off between stabilizing markets through policy and communication. A "kitish" central banker, who puts less weight on stability, reduces these inefficiencies.

econ.GN↗