Research

Book Chapters

``Spillovers and Program Evaluation at Scale'' (with Daniel Tannenbaum). Forthcoming in The Scale-Up Effect in Early Childhood and Public Policy: Why Interventions Lose Impact at Scale and What We Can Do About It, Edited by John List, Lauren Supplee, and Dana Suskind. Routledge.

Working Papers

"Are Measures of Early Education Programs Too Pessimistic? Evidence from a Large Scale Field Experiment" ( with John List and Yves Zenou) (PDF)

Abstract: We estimate the direct and spillover effects of a large-scale early childhood intervention on the educational attainment of over 2,000 disadvantaged children. We show that failing to account for spillover effects results in a severe underestimation of the true policy impact. The intervention induced modest positive direct effects on both cognitive and non-cognitive test scores of children assigned to the treatment groups. We document large spillover effects on both treatment and control children who live near treated children. On average, spillover effects increase a child's non-cognitive scores by about 1.2 standard deviations and increase cognitive scores about 0.6 to 0.7 standard deviations. The spillover effects are localized, decreasing with the spatial distance to treated neighbors. Our evidence suggests the spillover effects on non-cognitive scores are more likely to operate through the child's social network rather than the parents'. Our evidence also suggests influencing parental investment is an important channel through which cognitive spillover effects operate.

Publications

"When Corporate Social Responsibility Backfires: Theory and Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment" (with John List) Management Science, 2021, 67(1), 8-21. (Link)

Abstract: Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a cornerstone of modern business practice, developing from a “why” in the 1960s to a “must” today. Early empirical evidence on both the demand and supply sides has largely confirmed CSR's efficacy. This paper combines theory with a large-scale natural field experiment to connect CSR to an important but often neglected behavior: employee misconduct and shirking. Through employing more than 3000 workers, we find that our usage of CSR increases employee misbehavior - 20% more employees act detrimentally toward our firm by shirking on their primary job duty when we introduce CSR. Complementary treatments suggest that “moral licensing” is at work, in that the “doing good” nature of CSR induces workers to misbehave on another dimension that hurts the firm. In this way, our data highlight a potential dark cloud of CSR, and serve to forewarn that such business practices should not be blindly applied.

"Voluntary and Mandatory Provision of Common Pool Resources with Heterogeneous Appropriators" Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2020. (Link)

I was awarded the Science of Philanthropy Initiative (SPI) PhD grant for this research. (Link to my page at SPI website)

Abstract: Common pool resource (CPR) users often face provision problems and appropriation problems. This paper presents a laboratory experiment to study the choices of CPR users under different provision schemes, in a heterogeneous environment. In the first two treatment conditions, the level of contribution to the provision process is determined exogenously: in the regressive treatment, poor and rich individuals pay equal amounts to the provision of the resource, and in the progressive treatment, the entire provision cost is paid by rich members. Finally, in the endogenous condition subjects voluntarily choose how much to contribute through the Provision Point Mechanism. The experimental results provide strong evidence for inequality aversion motivating subjects' decisions. Interestingly, inequality aversion motivates the subjects' choices differently in the exogenous and in the endogenous provision conditions: in the regressive and the progressive treatments inequality aversion motivates the extraction choices while in the endogenous treatment inequality aversion motivates subjects' contribution decisions but not their extraction decisions.

"Leveraging Upfront Payments to Curb Employee Misbehavior: Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment" (with John List) European Economic Review, 2020. (Link)

Abstract: We use a natural field experiment in which we hired over 2,000 workers from an online labor market to explore how upfront payment affects worker motivation and misbehavior on the job. We start with a simple theory that shows paying upfront can increase misbehavior through reducing the perceived costs of cheating, but it can decrease misbehavior through generating a gift-exchange effect. Motivated by the theory, we designed a task that provided workers with opportunities to reciprocate or misbehave. A unique aspect of our design is that we are permitted an opportunity to measure the curvature of the gift-exchange value of the upfront payment. Our results suggest paying workers upfront induces a gift-exchange effect that is concave in the share of total wage paid upfront. Moreover, the impact is strong enough to suggest that small upfront payments are a cost-effective means for an employer to curb employee misbehavior.

Older Work

"Interim Performance Information: How Feedback Affects the Choice of Effort" (PDF)

Abstract: Costly effort choices are often made sequentially and over multiple steps. In many situations, individuals who make effort choices do not fully observe how well they are performing during the process. A more informed party may choose to reveal their private information about the agent's performance to the agent. This paper presents an experiment to study the impact of interim performance information on individuals' effort choices under different incentive schemes. Subjects make costly effort choices in two subsequent stages under convex and concave payment conditions. In No-Feedback treatments, subjects make their second effort choice without knowing the outcome of the first stage, and in Feedback treatment, subjects learn the outcome of the first stage before making their second effort choice. Experimental results show that interim feedback can be used as an effective tool to increase individual effort. However, the extent to which feedback impacts effort depends on the incentive scheme, as well as individual attitudes towards losses and risks.

"Improving Food Choices for Low-income Families with Young Children: A Supermarket Intervention" (with John List and Dana Suskind) (Awarded the USDA Center for Behavioral Economics and Healthy Food Choice Research Grant)