Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

This study investigates whether and to what extent the thematic relevance of emotive stimuli embedded in presidential speeches affects people’s risk perceptions and policy support regarding military interventions in civil conflict. Conducting an experimental study with a total of 1,187 participants, we find the induction of anger via thematically relevant emotive triggers leads to higher levels of support for military interventions in civil conflict even though people’s risk perceptions—which were high across all conditions—remain unaffected. By comparison, the effects of anger on policy support observed in the thematically irrelevant condition do not differ significantly from the emotion-neutral control condition. Thus, …

The Michigan property tax system gives rise to wide variation in taxable basis across comparable homes due to the application of acquisition-value based assessment limits. Exploiting the fact that the resulting differences in property tax liability are temporarily inherited by new homebuyers, I estimate the degree of capitalization of these largely-idiosyncratic tax differences in a setting free of many of the econometric problems that typically plague estimation of property tax capitalization in order to evaluate whether homebuyers understand the tax implications of their home purchases. Consistent with anecdotal evidence, I find that homebuyers are woefully inattentive to the temporary nature …