Vaasavi Unnava
Contact Information
Graduate Student, Department of Economics, College of Arts and Sciences
Research Interests
- Attitude Change/Persuasion
- Computational Modeling
- Decision Making/Choice
- Media
- Political Science
- Race/Racism
- Statistical Modeling
- Stereotyping and Prejudice
- Political Economy
- Information Economics
- Macroeconomics
My research develops a political economy of expectations: I study how rational agents with heterogeneous economic positions arrive at divergent political preferences and populist institutions even when they share the same aggregate information. Developing heterogeneous-agent general equilibrium models, I show that political outcomes (e.g. populist coalitions, polarized voting, institutional distortions) emerge as equilibrium price effects driven by differences in income, wealth, and exposure to aggregate shocks, without any behavioral assumptions. I do so by examining how social institutions like race, gender, and citizenship create pricing incentives for political policies traditionally explained through cultural attitudes, moral values, or group identity. This directly engages the science of polarization by offering a structural economic account of why political cleavages form and persist among otherwise rational agents. My applied work then examines what happens when the information environment itself is distorted through local media consolidation, probing how manipulation of a shared information source tilts this same equilibrium process and produces measurable shifts in political outcomes at the local and congressional level.