Julia Christensen is a first-year PhD student focusing on American politics, political behavior, and methodology. She graduated from Georgetown University in 2015 with majors in American government and economics and a minor in math. After graduating, she spent two years working at a consulting firm in Washington DC. Her most recent research has involved methods of identifying misreported voter behavior on post-election surveys.
I am a PhD student focusing on American politics, political behavior, and methodology. My most recent research has involved the public policy consequences of media coverage. In particular, I am interested in how media gate keeping can exacerbate (or in some cases alleviate) policy inequalities through a variety of behavioral and institutional mechanisms.
My second-year paper examines how the media mediates communication between local communities and policy makers. In the paper, I assess the mediating role of media on government response to natural disasters by exploiting random variation in coverage produced by news pressure, or events which dominate news coverage and "crowd out" other news stories. I first demonstrate that coverage of natural disasters produces greater government response. I then explore what stories are the most likely to be "crowded out" and consequently receive lower government expenditure following disasters.
In addition to my substantive work, I am interested in methodology and teach the department's graduate course on computational tools and methods.