I was reminded today of this great paper by Robert Jensen. It shows how price dispersion for fish decreased in India when cell phone towers were built and information about prices up and down the beach became easier to obtain. Beautiful graph.
Devin Pope
1,177 posts
Devin Pope
@Devin_G_Pope
Professor of behavioral science and economics at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business
Joined December 2013
- A remarkable paper is coming out in @QJEHarvard by @ProfDesmondAng. Using all officer-involved killings between 2002 and 2016 in LA County, the below figure is the impact of a killing on the high school GPAs of students living within .5 miles of the incident.
- I am wrapping up a paper (see abstract below) titled "Religious Observance in America: Evidence from Cellphone Data". I have a gazillion figures about religion that I think are pretty interesting and make for fun Twitter content.
- I just did a deep dive into the literature on the impact of having kids on the happiness/satisfaction of parents. For many reasons, this is a hard question to answer and there are a lot of really bad papers out there. In the end, here is my takeaway from this literature:
- Did economists start tweeting more when the the nation went into lock down? Yes - nearly twice as much initially. This graph shows the total number of original tweets each week produced by the 1,363 economists registered with rePEc. The red line is the approximate shutdown week.
- Fascinating new paper in AER: Insights shows that adoptive moms experience a similar earnings penalty as biological moms. Suggests biological factors such as child birth and breastfeeding are less important for earnings penalty than factors related to culture/preferences/norms.
- What a sweet graph! It shows the propensity to commit a crime by women leading up to and after having a baby (~50% drop from pre to post). It’s a job market paper by Massenkoff and Rose at Berkeley. Hat tip: @MargRev
- Part 3 – Religion in America: Evidence from Cellphone Data I compare frequency of religious worship attendance using my cellphone data with self-reported attendance data. Here are the main results:
- At the start of my mba behavioral econ class, I ask students what will happen if potential donors are offered a $10 gift card to give blood. Over 1/2 of the students predict it will decrease turnout. It makes me worry they need less rather than more behavioral economics...
- Q: What happens when you post a TikTok that goes viral (i.e. more than ~100 likes)? A: You start posting ~.4 more TikToks each day (relative to a carefully constructed control group)! People love attention and it makes them want to get more attention.
- I just learned something kind of cool about the NY Times. For many of their articles, they produce multiple headlines. They A/B test the headlines in the morning and then run with the winner for the rest of the day.
- I can’t stop thinking about this fact: Number of murders/homicides in US in 2018: ~16,000 Number of people killed by the police in US in 2018: ~1,000 (Thanks to @m_sendhil for pointing this out)
- I’m excited to start handling behavioral and applied micro papers at the AER in July. I hope to be able to read some great submissions!Congratulations to Devin Pope @Devin_G_Pope for being appointed as AER coeditor, starting in July. I’m delighted to have him on our team. @AEAjournals
