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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (2 results)

  • Thesis
  • Peer Reviewed
UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2020)

This dissertation studies how the past influences our future choices. Leveraging insights from psychology, I study the role of past actions in forming habits and the role of past experiences in altering beliefs and preferences. I explore implications of these findings for individuals, firms, and the macroeconomy.

In the first chapter, I ask - how should organizations incentivize routine behaviors? I use a cue-based model of habit formation to describe hand hygiene behavior in hospitals and suggest implications for intervention to change behavior. Hand hygiene is the best way to prevent healthcare-associated infections which affect millions of patients and cost billions of dollars each year. However, many studies find that healthcare workers comply with hand hygiene guidelines less than half of the time. Leveraging a unique dataset that tracks compliance behavior of 13,606 workers in 123M hand hygiene opportunities, I document patterns of behavior consistent with a cue-based theory of habit. High compliers benefit from automatic hand washing and are buffered from the negative impacts of cognitive load. However, habits are broken when high compliers are taken out of their normal routines. The findings have implications for how hospitals should design, target, and implement hand hygiene interventions.

In the second chapter, in joint work with Ulrike Malmendier, we ask whether the past can explain some of the vast differences in homeownership rates across countries and cohorts. We argue that macroeconomic histories individuals have personally experienced in their home country over the past decades play a significant role in their decision to become a homeowner. We present novel survey data that reveals inflation protection as a key motivation to buy rather than rent a home. We then show that higher exposure to inflation predicts home ownership, controlling for other known determinants of homeownership as well as any differences across countries and over time. First, we find that immigrants' country-of-origin inflation experiences strongly predict their homeownership rates in the US. Second, analyzing data from 22 European countries, we estimate that a one log-point increase in personally experienced inflation predicts a 18pp increase in the average individual's likelihood of homeownership. As predicted by our model, the effects are strongest in countries with predominantly fixed-rate mortgages.

    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    UCLA Previously Published Works (2020)
    How well do pre-school delay of gratification and life-course measures of self-regulation predict mid-life capital formation? We surveyed 113 participants of the 1967-1973 Bing pre-school studies on delay of gratification when they were in their late 40's. They reported 11 mid-life capital formation outcomes, including net worth, permanent income, absence of high-interest debt, forward-looking behaviors, and educational attainment. To address multiple hypothesis testing and our small sample, we pre-registered an analysis plan of well-powered tests. As predicted, a newly constructed and pre-registered measure derived from preschool delay of gratification does not predict the 11 capital formation variables (i.e., the sign-adjusted average correlation was 0.02). A pre-registered composite self-regulation index, combining preschool delay of gratification with survey measures of self-regulation collected at ages 17, 27, and 37, does predict 10 of the 11 capital formation variables in the expected direction, with an average correlation of 0.19. The inclusion of the preschool delay of gratification measure in this composite index does not affect the index's predictive power. We tested several hypothesized reasons that preschool delay of gratification does not have predictive power for our mid-life capital formation variables.
      Cover page: Predicting mid-life capital formation with pre-school delay of gratification and life-course measures of self-regulation
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