Recent ucsbecon_postprints items

Distinguishing Common Ratio Preferences from Common Ratio Effects Using Paired Valuation Tasks

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Without strong assumptions about how noise manifests in choices, we can infer little from existing empirical observations of the common ratio effect (CRE) about whether there exists an underlying common ratio preference (CRP). We propose to solve this inferential challenge using paired valuations, which yield valid inference under common assumptions. Using this approach in an online experiment with 900 participants, we find no evidence of a systematic CRP. To reconcile our findings with existing evidence, we present the same participants with paired choice tasks and demonstrate how noise can generate a CRE even for individuals without an associated CRP. (JEL C91, D81, D91)

Are elites meritocratic and efficiency-seeking? Evidence from MBA students

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Are elites meritocratic and efficiency-seeking? Evidence from MBA students

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...

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...

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...

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

Choosing Partners: A classroom experiment

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

Choosing Partners: A classroom experiment

Global evidence for ultraviolet radiation decreasing COVID-19 growth rates

Mon, 8 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

With nearly every country combating the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19), there is a need to understand how local environmental conditions may modify transmission. To date, quantifying seasonality of the disease has been limited by scarce data and the difficulty of isolating climatological variables from other drivers of transmission in observational studies. We combine a spatially resolved dataset of confirmed COVID-19 cases, composed of 3,235 regions across 173 countries, with local environmental conditions and a statistical approach developed to quantify causal effects of environmental conditions in observational data settings. We find that ultraviolet (UV) radiation has a statistically significant effect on daily COVID-19 growth rates: a SD increase in UV lowers the daily growth rate of COVID-19 cases by ∼1 percentage point over the subsequent 2.5 wk, relative to an average in-sample growth rate of 13.2%. The time pattern of lagged effects peaks 9 to 11 d after UV exposure,...

Bacille Calmette-Guérin Vaccination in Infancy Does Not Protect Against Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19): Evidence From a Natural Experiment in Sweden

Sun, 4 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

BACKGROUND: The bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) tuberculosis vaccine has immunity benefits against respiratory infections. Accordingly, it has been hypothesized to have a protective effect against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Recent research found that countries with universal BCG childhood vaccination policies tend to be less affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, such ecological studies are biased by numerous confounders. Instead, this paper reports on a rare nationwide natural experiment that occurred in Sweden in 1975, where discontinuation of newborns' BCG vaccination led to a dramatic decrease in BCG coverage rate, thus allowing us to estimate BCG's effect without the biases associated with cross-country comparisons. METHODS: Numbers of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations were recorded for birth cohorts born just before and just after 1975, representing 1 026 304 and 1 018 544 individuals, respectively. We used regression discontinuity to assess the effect of...

Personality and Marital Surplus

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Personality and Marital Surplus

Gender gaps in the effects of childhood family environment: Do they persist into adulthood?

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We examine the differential effects of family disadvantage on the education and adult labor market outcomes of men and women using high-quality administrative data on the entire population of Denmark born between 1966 and 1995. We link parental education and family structure during childhood to male-female and brother-sister differences in teenage outcomes, educational attainment, and adult earnings and employment. Our results are consistent with U.S. findings that boys benefit more from an advantageous family environment than do girls in terms of the behavior and grade-school outcomes. Father's education, which has not been examined in previous studies, is particularly important for sons. However, we find a very different pattern of parental influence on adult outcomes. The gender gaps in educational attainment, employment, and earnings are increasing in maternal education, benefiting daughters. Paternal education decreases the gender gaps in educational attainment (favoring...

Educational Inequality and the Returns to Skills

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Research and policy discussion about the diverging fortunes of children from advantaged and disadvantaged households have focused on the skill disparities between these children – how they might arise and how they might be remediated. Analysis of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health reveals another important mechanism in the determinants of educational attainment – differential returns to skills for children in different circumstances. Though the returns to cognitive ability are generally consistent across family background groups, personality traits have very different effects on educational attainment for young men and women with access to different levels of parental resources. These results are consistent with a model in which the provision of focused effort in school is complementary with parental inputs while openness, associated with imagination and exploration, is a substitute for information provision by educated parents and thus contributes...

Educational gender gaps

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Cross-country studies reveal two consistent gender gaps in education-underachievement in school by boys and low rates of participation in STEM studies by girls. Recent economics research has shown the importance of social influences on women's STEM avoidance, but male low achievement has been less-studied and tends to be attributed to behavior problems and deficient non-cognitive skills. I revisit the determinants of the gender gap in U.S. educational attainment with a relatively-advantaged sample of young men and women and find that school behavior and measured skills are not very important drivers of gender differences, particularly in the transition to college. Educational aspirations, on the other hand, are strongly predictive of educational gaps and the gender difference in aspirations cannot be explained, even with rich adolescent data that includes parental expectations and school achievement indicators. These results suggest that gender identity concerns may influence...

Father Absence and the Educational Gender Gap

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The educational attainment of young women now exceeds that of young men in most of the developed world, and women account for about 60% of new four-year college graduates in the United States. Several studies have suggested that the increase in single-parent households may be contributing to the growing gender gap in education, as boys are more vulnerable to the negative effects of father absence and economic disadvantage than girls. Using data on recent cohorts of young men and women from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), I find evidence consistent with other studies that boys are relatively more likely to experience problems in school, including school suspensions, when their father is absent, but also that girls are relatively more likely to experience depression in adolescence, particularly in step-father families. By the time Add Health subjects are young adults, there is no evidence that father absence early in life is more strongly...

Cohabitation and the Uneven Retreat from Marriage in the U.S., 1950-2010

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Since 1950 the sources of the gains from marriage have changed radically. As the educational attainment of women overtook and surpassed that of men and the ratio of men's to women's wage rates fell, traditional patterns of gender specialization in work weakened. The primary source of the gains to marriage shifted from the production of household services and commodities to investment in children. For some, these changes meant that marriage was no longer worth the costs of limited independence and potential mismatch. Cohabitation became an acceptable living arrangement for all groups, but cohabitation serves different functions among different groups. The poor and less educated are much more likely to rear children in cohabitating relationships. The college educated typically cohabit before marriage, but they marry before conceiving children and their marriages are relatively stable. We argue that different patterns of childrearing are the key to understanding class differences...

Your Place or Mine? On the Residence Choice of Young Couples in Norway