Recent ucsbecon items

In Nash equilibrium, when would just one country contribute to pharmaceutical research

Sun, 16 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In Nash equilibrium, when would just one country contribute to pharmaceutical research

Lectures on the Elasticity of Substitution

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Lectures on the Elasticity of Substitution

Lectures on Separable Preferences

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Lectures on Separable Preferences

Quantifying the global climate feedback from energy-based adaptation

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Many behavioral responses to climate change are carbon-intensive, raising concerns that adaptation may cause additional warming. The sign and magnitude of this feedback depend on how increased emissions from cooling balance against reduced emissions from heating across space and time. We present an empirical approach that forecasts the effect of future adaptive energy use on global average temperature over the 21st century. We estimate that energy-based adaptation will lower global mean surface temperature in 2099 by 0.07 to 0.12 °C relative to baseline projections under Representative Concentration Pathways 4.5 and 8.5. This cooling avoids 0.6 to 1.8 trillion U.S. Dollars ($2019) in damages, depending on the baseline emissions scenario. Energy-based adaptation lowers business-as-usual emissions for 85% of countries, reducing the mitigation required to meet their unilateral Nationally Determined Contributions by 20% on average. These findings indicate that while business-as-usual...

Modeling Machine Learning: A Cognitive Economic Approach

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Modeling Machine Learning: A Cognitive Economic Approach

Perceptions and detection of AI use in manuscript preparation for academic journals

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The rapid advances in Generative AI tools have produced both excitement and worry about how AI will impact academic writing. However, little is known about what norms are emerging around AI use in manuscript preparation or how these norms might be enforced. We address both gaps in the literature by conducting a survey of 271 academics about whether it is necessary to report ChatGPT use in manuscript preparation and by running GPT-modified abstracts from 2,716 published papers through a leading AI detection software to see if these detectors can detect different AI uses in manuscript preparation. We find that most academics do not think that using ChatGPT to fix grammar needs to be reported, but detection software did not always draw this distinction, as abstracts for which GPT was used to fix grammar were often flagged as having a high chance of being written by AI. We also find disagreements among academics on whether more substantial use of ChatGPT to rewrite text needs to be...

Reconsidering Causation

Mon, 24 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Recent applied work in economics has displayed renewed interest in the problem of characterizing the causal relations that link economic variables. However, many discussions avoid explicit specification ofwhat has to be true about a formal model to justify an assertion that one variable in it causes another. Such specification is supplied here. Related topics, such as determining whether correlation implies causation, or vice-versa, and when causal coefficients can be estimated using ordinary least squares or instrumental variables regressions, are discussed.

Geographic Variation in Cesarean Sections in the United States: Trends, Correlates, and Other Interesting Facts.

Thu, 9 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Analyzing data spanning three decades covering the near universe of births, we study county-level differences in Cesarean section (C-section) rates among first-time mothers of singleton births. Our research reveals persistent geographic variation in C-section rates for both low- and high-risk groups. Counties with elevated C-section rates consistently perform more C-sections across mothers at all levels of appropriateness for the procedure. These elevated rates of C-section in high C-section counties are associated with reduced maternal and infant morbidity. We also find that C-section decisions are less responsive to underlying risks for Black mothers relative to white mothers, suggesting potential welfare-reducing disparities.

Fortune and identity

Mon, 4 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Fortune and identity

Endogenous rewards promote cooperation

Fri, 10 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Sustaining cooperation in social dilemmas is a fundamental objective in the social and biological sciences. Although providing a punishment option to community members in the public goods game (PGG) has been shown to effectively promote cooperation, this has some serious disadvantages; these include destruction of a society's physical resources as well as its overall social capital. A more efficient approach may be to instead employ a reward mechanism. We propose an endogenous reward mechanism that taxes the gross income of each round's PGG play and assigns the amount to a fund; each player then decides how to distribute his or her share of the fund as rewards to other members of the community. Our mechanism successfully reverses the decay trend and achieves a high level of contribution with budget-balanced rewards that require no external funding, an important condition for practical implementation. Simulations based on type-specific estimations indicate that the payoff-based...

Can targeted messages reduce COVID-19 vaccination hesitancy? A randomized trial

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Background: Widespread vaccination is certainly a critical element in successfully fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. We apply theories of social identity to design targeted messaging to reduce vaccine hesitancy among groups with low vaccine uptake, such as African Americans and political conservatives. Methods: Participants. We conducted an online experiment from April 7 to 27, 2021, that oversampled Black, Latinx, conservative, and religious U.S. residents. We first solicited the vaccination status of over 10,000 individuals. Of the 4,609 individuals who reported being unvaccinated, 4,190 enrolled in our covariate-adaptive randomized trial.Interventions. We provided participants messages that presented the health risks of COVID-19 to oneself and others; they also received messages about the benefits of a COVID-19 vaccine and an endorsement by a celebrity. Messages were randomly tailored to each participant's identities-Black, Latinx, conservative, religious, or being...

Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of Branded Drugs With Market Demand and Insurance

Thu, 3 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

OBJECTIVES: Cost-effectiveness analysis of branded pharmaceuticals presumes that both cost (or price) and marginal effectiveness levels are exogenous. This assumption underlies most judgments of the cost-effectiveness of specific drugs. In this study, we show the theoretical implications of letting both factors be endogenous by modeling pharmaceutical price setting with and without health insurance, along with patient response to the prices that depend on marginal effectiveness. We then explore the implications of these models for cost-effectiveness ratios. METHODS: We used simple textbook models of patient demand and pricing behavior of drug firms to predict market equilibria in the drug and insurance markets and to generate calculations of the cost-effectiveness ratios in those settings. RESULTS: We found that ratios in market settings can be much different from those calculated in cost-effectiveness studies based on exogenous prices and treatment of all patients at risk rather...

Can financial incentives help people trying to establish new habits? Experimental evidence with new gym members

Tue, 4 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Can financial incentives aid habit formation in people attempting to establish a positive health behavior? We provide evidence on this question from a randomized controlled trial of modest-sized incentives to attend the gym among new members of a fitness facility. Our experiment randomized 690 participants into a control group that received a $30 payment unconditionally or one of 3 incentive groups that received a payment for attending the gym at least 9 times over the first 6 weeks of membership. Two incentive treatment arms offered monetary payments of $30 and $60. The third incentive treatment, motivated by the endowment effect, offered a physical item worth $30. All three incentives had only small impacts on attendance during members' first 6 weeks and no effect on their post-incentive visit trajectories. We document substantial overconfidence among new members about their likely visits and discuss how overconfidence may undermine the effectiveness of incentive programs.

Micro-marketing healthier choices: Effects of personalized ordering suggestions on restaurant purchases

Tue, 4 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We study the effects of the Nutricate receipt, which makes personalized recommendations to switch from unhealthy to healthier items at a restaurant chain. We find that the receipts shifted the mix of items purchased toward the healthier alternatives. For example, the share of adult main dishes requesting "no sauce" increased by 6.8 percent, the share of kids' meals with apples (instead of fries) rose by 7.0 percent and the share of breakfast sandwiches without sausage increased by 3.8 percent. The results illustrate the potential of emerging information technologies, which allow retailers to tailor product marketing to individual consumers, to generate healthier choices.

Self-selection into payments for ecosystem services programs

Fri, 26 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Designers and funders of payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs have long worried that payments flow to landholders who would have conserved forests even without the program, undermining the environmental benefits ("additionality") and cost-effectiveness of PES. If landholders self-select into PES programs based on how much conservation they were going to undertake anyway, then those who were planning to conserve should always enroll. This paper discusses the less-appreciated fact that enrollment is often based on other factors too. The hassle of signing up or financial costs of enrollment (e.g., purchasing seedlings) can affect who participates in a PES program. These enrollment costs reduce overall take-up, and, importantly, they can also influence the composition of landholders who select into the program-and thereby the program's environmental benefits per enrollee. Enrollment costs can increase a program's benefits per enrollee if they are systematically higher for...

The limits of simple implementation intentions: Evidence from a field experiment on making plans to exercise

Tue, 23 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Recent large-scale randomized experiments find that helping people form implementation intentions by asking when and where they plan to act increases one-time actions, such as vaccinations, preventative screenings and voting. We investigate the effect of a simple scalable planning intervention on a repeated behavior using a randomized design involving 877 subjects at a private gym. Subjects were randomized into i) a treatment group who selected the days and times they intended to attend the gym over the next two weeks or ii) a control group who instead recorded their days of exercise in the prior two weeks. In contrast to recent studies, we find that the planning intervention did not have a positive effect on behavior. We observe a tightly estimated null effect even though the majority of subjects believed that planning is helpful and despite clear evidence that they engaged with the planning process.

The blue paradox: Preemptive overfishing in marine reserves

Mon, 22 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Most large-scale conservation policies are anticipated or announced in advance. This risks the possibility of preemptive resource extraction before the conservation intervention goes into force. We use a high-resolution dataset of satellite-based fishing activity to show that anticipation of an impending no-take marine reserve undermines the policy by triggering an unintended race-to-fish. We study one of the world's largest marine reserves, the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA), and find that fishers more than doubled their fishing effort once this area was earmarked for eventual protected status. The additional fishing effort resulted in an impoverished starting point for PIPA equivalent to 1.5 y of banned fishing. Extrapolating this behavior globally, we estimate that if other marine reserve announcements were to trigger similar preemptive fishing, this could temporarily increase the share of overextracted fisheries from 65% to 72%. Our findings have implications for general...

A geometry of three-candidate elections

Sun, 14 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A geometry of three-candidate elections

Sun, 14 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A geometry of three-candidate elections

Functional diversity of catch mitigates negative effects of temperature variability on fisheries yields

Thu, 4 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Temperature variation within a year can impact biological processes driving population abundances. The implications for the ecosystem services these populations provide, including food production from marine fisheries, are poorly understood. Whether and how temperature variability impacts fishery yields may depend on the number of harvested species and differences in their responses to varying temperatures. Drawing from previous theoretical and empirical studies, we predict that greater temperature variability within years will reduce yields, but harvesting a larger number of species, especially a more functionally diverse set, will decrease this impact. Using a global marine fisheries dataset, we find that within-year temperature variability reduces yields, but current levels of functional diversity (FD) of targeted species, measured using traits related to species' responses to temperature, largely offset this effect. Globally, high FD of catch could avoid annual losses in yield...

THE LAW OF ONE PRICE, BORDERS AND PURCHASING POWER PARITY

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Conventional wisdom claims that the Law of One Price (LOP) fails in commodity markets, commodity borders are wide and Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) fails. But the evidence supporting those claims comes primarily from retail markets where price differentials do not represent risk-free profits. As we show, prices from a wide range of auction markets strongly support the LOP, reject wide borders and do not reject PPP. In addition, recognizing the difference between retail and auction markets helps explain several puzzles associated with exchange rates. The Keynesian paradigm dominates macroeconomics. We question that dominance for two reasons: (1) by reviving PPP we reject Liquidity Preference and support Loanable funds and (2) we reject the standard Keynesian assumption that commodity markets clear slowly and asset markets clear rapidly. Whether commodity or asset, retail markets clear slowly. Whether commodity or asset, auction markets clear rapidly.

Is the All-NBA Selection Process Biased? Examining the Effect of Market Size on Media Member Votes for All-NBA Teams

Wed, 13 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines the effect of market size on the votes for the National Basketball Association’s All-NBA teams. While the All-NBA teams are intended to represent the league’s best players, prior research suggests that media members vote based on factors other than performance. I hypothesize that a player on a large market team is more likely to receive votes than a player with comparable performance but on a small market team. Using All-NBA ballots from five consecutive seasons and Nielsen television market sizes, I employ a two-part model approach to determine the effects of market size, being born outside the United States, representing an East Coast team, and Team Win-Loss Percentage on All-NBA votes. I find that the effect of market size on All-NBA votes is unclear, but Team Win-Loss Percentage has a significant positive effect. Future studies could introduce other factors to the models such as age and race.

Refugees and Their Effects on Voting in Host Countries: A German Social Analysis

Wed, 13 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The decision by Germany to lead the effort against the refugee crisis in 2015 sparked controversy amongmany of its native population. With over a million new refugees in 2015 and 2016 alone fleeing war andterorrism from mainly Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, member’s of Germany’s far-right were outraged bythe decision. The AfD used the controversy to create a platform and gain popularity. They eventuallygained the third most votes in the 2017 federal election, the first time in 60 years that an openlynationalistic party would enter parliament. In this paper, we analyze how an increasing number ofrefugees affects voting sentiment in Germany. We search for causal effects of refugee numbers on votingfor far-right political parties. We perform our analysis with multiple regression models, mainly relying onfixed effects to determine causality. Although our initial hypothesis was that there should be a positiverelationship between the refugee share and voting for far-right political parties,...

Content and Competition in Local Newspaper Markets

Wed, 13 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I propose a methodology to isolate the effect of competition on media content using local newspaper closures as an exogenous change in competition to closured newspapers’ competitors. I define five topical metrics and construct a specialized categorization scheme to measure newspaper content over time. By comparing content across the periods before and after a newspapers’ competitor closes, I hold all factors that may affect content constant save the level of competition in the market and chronological time. Following the theoretical model proposed by Perego and Yuksel (2020), I hypothesize that decreasing competition should incentivize general content and disincentivize specialized content. I test my hypothesis on a case-study of 13 local newspapers in California over the period from 2000 to 2020. I am unable to differentiate the effect of decreasing competition from other time-related factors, and therefore cannot make a definitive conclusion from the limited data. However,...

False-Positive Social Psychology: How Deviations from Preregistrations Affect the Probability of False-Positive Significance

Wed, 13 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Numerous solutions have been proposed to address the replication crisis, in which numeroushigh-profile empirical research studies cannot be replicated by other research teams. One possibleexplanation is that researchers have the option to adjust their data analyses after viewingthe results, inflating false positive rates. One popular solution is study preregistration, the practiceof developing the data analysis plan before the data is collected. However, preregistrationsonly alleviate replication problems if researchers are held accountable to their analysis plans.Across two related studies, we explore the effectiveness of preregistration in its current form.In Study 1, we audit recent preregistered publications from a major psychology journal andobserve deviations in 19 of 32 papers. In Study 2, we simulate the effects of generic deviationson the false-positive rate. We find that deviations that run more or more varied tests causelarger changes, tripling the false-positive rate...

Would Origin and Type of Undergraduate Universities Affect Ph.D. Ranking? Evidence From 2021-2022 Job Market

Wed, 13 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The proportion of international Ph.D. candidates has been increasing in recentyears, and the growing importance of international candidates requires researchersto pay more attention to the differences between them and Americancandidates. Using information collected from CVs on the 2021-2022 economicsPh.D. job market, we find that international candidates are more likely to havea previous graduate degree before a Ph.D., and less likely to have full time RAexperiences and a background in math. The results of this study suggest thatseveral variables have positive effects on Ph.D program rankings: graduatingfrom a highly ranked undergraduate institution, having full time RA experiences,and coming from Western Europe, Eastern Europe, or Latin America,while candidates attending an unranked undergraduate institution and an liberalarts college are less likely to graduate from highly ranked Ph.D. programs.

Sitting Down During Hard Times: Why Has American Labor Force Participation Declined?

Wed, 13 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In order to understand why labor force participation (andemployment rate) have declined in the United States over the pasttwo decades, declines in the employment to population ratio wereregressed against minimum wage, labor laws and labor forcecharacteristics during the last three major recession periods. Theresults yielded little significant effects of minimum wage orunionization, but a strong negative effect of the percent of the laborforce employed in the service sector.

Political Ideology and Early Restaurant Avoidance During Covid-19

Wed, 13 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This paper studies whether political ideology affected early restaurant avoidance behavior during Covid-19 in March 2020. Early conflicting narratives about the severity of Covid-19 driven by political leaders and media outlets with liberal versus conservative views may impact the speed in which Republican and Democratic cities adopt safety measures such as avoiding dining at restaurants. I use data on seated dining rates at restaurants from OpenTable and find that cities in the United States with more Democratic voters saw faster declines in seated dining. I also find that cities with more Covid-19 cases saw faster declines in seated dining rates, but this effect is concentrated on early adopter cities. These findings have public health implications which suggest that effective public health policy should take the influence of politics on behavior into account.

How much potable water is saved by wastewater recycling? Quasi-experimental evidence from California

Mon, 18 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

How much potable water is saved by wastewater recycling? Quasi-experimental evidence from California

Living Supply and Demand Curves

Sun, 27 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Living Supply and Demand Curves

When are there Condorcet winners despite extremist preferences

Sun, 27 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

When are there Condorcet winners despite extremist preferences

To read and be read: When monopolists control access to academic prestige

Sun, 27 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

To read and be read: When monopolists control access to academic prestige

Choosing Partners: A classroom experiment

Sat, 23 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Choosing Partners: A classroom experiment

Risk Aversion and Theft as a Source of Risk