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Events

October 22, 2024

Parenthood in Poverty (co-authored with Christina Kent)

Department of Economics, Bocconi University

Porter Hall 223D (SDS Conference Room)
12:30 pm

Parenthood could change economic and psycho-social trajectories profoundly, creating opportunities in some domains of life and strain in others. Individuals of low SES, who might lack resources to weather the disruptions caused by parenthood, may face distinct challenges, detailed knowledge of which would greatly aid better design of social assistance. We provide comprehensive evidence of the effects of new parenthood on key markers of economic and psycho-social well-being among women of low SES in the U.S. Using longitudinal, high frequency administrative records from a large urban county in combination with an event study design, we find that new parenthood leads to: i) short-term and long-term changes in the housing environment, including increases in short-term homeless-shelter stays, transition into longer-term homelessness programs, and transition into public housing; ii) an increase in treatment for opioid use disorder likely driven by those with a pre-existing, formerly untreated disorder; iii) large eligibility-rule driven increases in use of key government assistance programs for healthcare, food assistance, and cash assistance; iv) large reductions in criminal behavior, unlikely to be driven by increased access to government assistance. Effects are heterogeneous by race and vulnerability to mental health disorders. Robustness checks, including two separate (matched) difference-in-differences analyses, suggest robustness to endogeneity in the timing of first parenthood.

October 24, 2024

Article-Level Slant and Polarization of News Consumption on Social Media

Department of Decision Sciences, Bocconi University

Tepper 4242
12:30 pm

Co-hosted with the Center for Behavioral & Decision Research (CBDR) 

 There is widespread concern that the online news ecosystem produces highly polarized content and that extreme content gets further amplified through social media distribution channels. Methodological limitations in estimating content-based slant at the article level have made evaluating these claims difficult. We use data on the near universe (∼ 1 million) of hard news articles published online by the top 100 U.S. news outlets in 2019, in combination with recent advances in natural language processing, to obtain a measure of content-based slant at the article level. We report five main findings. First, the majority (65%) of the variance in slant across articles arises within outlets, rather than across outlets. Second, most news produced is centrist, but the tails of the slant distribution are thick. Third, using article-level engagement data from the universe of U.S. Facebook users, we find that extreme content is much more likely to be shared widely on Facebook than moderate content. Fourth, consistent with concerns over echo chambers, left- and right-leaning users get exposed to and consume highly congenial news articles on Facebook, even after residualizing for outlet provenance. Fifth, polarization in news consumption, defined as the scaled difference between the average slant consumed by liberals and by conservatives, is higher than previously thought, because most existing measures do not take into account the fact that partisans consume pro-attitudinal news even within outlets.”

Lost in Transmission

Professor of Economics and Management 
University of Cologne

Co-hosted with the Center for Behavioral & Decision Research (CBDR)

March 21, 2024
TEP 4242 (In Person)
12:30 pm 

 For many decisions, people rely on information received from others by word of mouth. How does the process of verbal transmission distort economic information? In our experiments, participants listen to audio recordings containing economic forecasts and are paid to accurately transmit the information via voice messages. Other participants listen either to an original recording or a transmitted version and then state incentivized beliefs. Our main finding is that, across a variety of transmitter incentive schemes, information about the reliability of a forecast is lost in transmission more than twice as much as information about the forecast’s level. This differential information loss predictably distorts listeners’ belief updates: following transmission, reliable and unreliable messages converge in influence and average belief updates from new information are weakened. Mechanism experiments show that the differential loss is not driven by transmitters deliberately trading off the costs and benefits of transmitting different kinds of information. Instead, it results from memory constraints during transmission, which can be overcome through targeted reminders.

Uncertainty Motivates Morality

Professor of Economics
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Associate Professor of Economics and Dean's Chair (On Leave)
National University of Singapore

Co-hosted with the Center for Behavioral & Decision Research (CBDR)

November 9, 2023
TEP 2202 (In Person)

We propose an uncertainty-motivated morality hypothesis whereby individuals behave more morally under uncertainty than under certainty, as if moral behavior will yield a better outcome as the result of uncertainty. We test this hypothesis in a series of experiments and observe that individuals are more honest under uncertain situations than degenerate deterministic situations. We further show that this pattern is best explained by our hypothesis and is robust and generalizable. These results are incompatible with standard models and consistent with quasi-magical thinking and related notions. Our study contributes to the literature of decision-making under uncertainty and with moral considerations.

Epstein/Atkinson Chair in Management Leadership
Professor of Economics and Strategy
Rady School of Management, UC San Diego

April 13, 2023
Giant Eagle Auditorium - Baker Hall A51

An informative and entertaining account of how actions send signals that shape behaviors and how to design better incentives for better results in our life, our work, and our world.

Incentives send powerful signals that aim to influence behavior. But often there is a conflict between what we say and what we do in response to these incentives. The result: mixed signals.

Consider the CEO who urges teamwork but designs incentives for individual success, who invites innovation but punishes failure, who emphasizes quality but pays for quantity. Employing real-world scenarios just like this to illustrate this everyday phenomenon, behavioral economist Uri Gneezy explains why incentives often fail and demonstrates how the right incentives can change behavior by aligning with signals for better results.

Drawing on behavioral economics, game theory, psychology, and fieldwork, Gneezy outlines how to be incentive smart, designing rewards that are simple and effective. He highlights how the right combination of economic and psychological incentives can encourage people to drive more fuel-efficient cars, be more innovative at work, and even get to the gym. “Incentives send a signal,” Gneezy writes, “and your objective is to make sure this signal is aligned with your goals.”

Sludge: Behavioral Science under the Star-Spangled Banner

Robert Walmsley University Professor, Harvard Law School

October 27, 2022
Giant Eagle Auditorium, Baker Hall A51

(Photo by Rose Lincoln)

 "Sludge" consists of administrative burdens, or frictions, that prevent people from getting where they want to get, or from obtaining something that they think they need. Examples include complex and confusing forms; hidden terms; phone appointments; waiting time; in-person interview requirements; mail-in forms; slides with lots of words on them; jargon-filled language. Sludge greatly decreases social welfare and is associated with disproportionate harms on vulnerable communities; it also raises a host of unresolved empirical issues in social science. This talk will explore the need for Sludge Audits and urge that sludge reduction is essential to improving people's lives, not least by protecting their rights.

COVID, Schools, Learning Loss, and the Value of Data

Emily Oster

Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence and Professor of Economics, Brown University Executive Director, COVID-19 School Data Hub

Bestselling author of Expecting Better, Cribsheet, and The Family Firm

March 30, 2022
Baker Hall 136A (Adamson Wing) 

 This talk will discuss the landscape of data on COVID in schools during the pandemic and research on the consequences of school closures. It will delve into why it was so difficult to get reliable data on these topics and detail the process of creating a usable empirical dataset on schools from disparate sources. The talk will also cover what we have learned so far about the consequences of school closures in the US during the COVID-19 pandemic.