Current Research
My research is in the area of behavioural, labour and health economics. While I appear interested in a variety of topics, there is one main thread that runs through my recent projects, which has to do with "open mindedness". I am interested in what can trigger people to consider other views, consider other jobs, other foods, etc. It could be that people stick to their habits and beliefs for a good reason (it could be optimal!) but we have a lot of evidence that people don't even know about, let alone consider alternatives. This is that "willingness to consider" that I am interested in.
Political views: I have started venturing in the domain of political economy, wondering about what could trigger people to engage with others who think differently on key issues such as abortion laws, gun laws or immigration.
Bridging America’s Divide on Abortion, Guns and Immigration: An Experimental Study (joint with Guglielmo Briscese)
This is an experimental study on 2,500 Americans who are given the opportunity to listen to recordings of fellow countrymen and women expressing their views on immigration, abortion laws and gun ownership laws. We also test whether emphasizing common grounds (such as agreement on basic human rights or on simple behavioral etiquette rules) with those who think differently helps bridging views. We find that most Americans (more than two-thirds) are willing to listen to a view opposite to theirs, and a small fraction (ten percent) reports changing their views as a result. Emphasizing common grounds induces people to adjust their views towards the centre on abortion and immigration, relative to a control group, thus potentially reducing polarization.
Dietary habits: Our diet has changed dramatically over the last four or five decades. Rich countries are now fortunate enough to have food abundance and have access to an extraordinary range of different foods. Now more than ever, most of us could easily eat healthily, yet, the Western diet is pretty bad on average. The typical western diet is high in fat and sugar, and is associated with pretty much any chronic disease we face. For almost a decade now, I have been interested in understanding how one can support the formation of healthier dietary habits among children, and particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds. For the last five years, my research has been funded by a large EU grant (with a consortium of teams from different disciplines in various universities in Europe). We have worked with schools and with families directly to test and evaluate interventions.
Healthy School Meals and Educational Outcomes, with Jonathan James, Journal of Health Economics (2011)
Here we evaluate the effects of the Jamie Oliver Feed Me Better Campaign (implemented in round 80 schools in Greenwich) on educational outcomes. We find that healthier meals at lunch improve educational performance, particularly for girls and for children from less deprived backgrounds.
Incentives and Children's Dietary Choice: A Field Experiment in Primary Schools, with Jonathan James and Patrick Nolen, Journal of Health Economics (2016)
We conduct a field experiment in primary schools in the UK and test the effects of providing incentives to eat fruit and vegetables at lunch. We test different incentives (competition, piece rate) and find that competitive incentives work best (we reward each child in a groups of 4 who chose the most times (days) fruit and veg at lunch.
Facilitating Healthier Dietary Habits: An Experiment with a Low Income Population, with Jonathan James and Jonathan Spiteri, published in European Economic Review.
We test an intervention aimed at facilitating (cognitively) the adoption of healthy dietary habits. We provide easy-to-understand information about the risks of developing diabetes or heart diseases and give easy-to-follow dietary recommendations to minimize these risks. We implement two variations, one consisting of generic information, the other consisting of information tailored to the individual, the latter resembling newly developed on-line health assessment tools. On top of the information treatment, we implement a second experimental variation nudging people into spending more time thinking about their dietary choices. We find evidence that the information intervention leads to healthier choices in the short run, but mostly in the generic treatment. Surprisingly, we find that people are on average pessimistic about their health, and therefore receive good news on average when the information is tailored to them. We find no evidence that increasing the time available to make choices leads to healthier choices, and find no evidence of long-term changes in habits. These results do not support a bounded rationality explanation for poor dietary choices.
Mind Training, Stress and Behaviour - a Randomised Experiment, with Yonas Alem, Aniko Biro and Hannah Behrendt, published in PLOSOne
We conduct a field experiment with students to investigate the malleability of risk and time preferences, using a well-known psychological technique (Mindfuless Based Stress Reduction). This relates to health behaviours to the extent that risk and time preferences are believed to play a key role in these behaviours. While most interventions inspired by insights from behavioural economics take behavioural anomalies (such as present bias) as given, we investigate to what extent one could train oneself to alter these behavioral anomalies (i.e. for example become more self controlled).
Stress and Food Preferences: A Lab Experiment with Low SES mothers, with Jonathan James, Martina Vecchi and Nicola Vitt, published in European Economic Review
We investigate whether short-term everyday stressors leads to unhealthier dietary choices among low socioeconomic status mothers. We propose a novel stress protocol that aims to mimic everyday stressors experienced by this population, involving time and financial pressure. We evaluate the impact of stress on immediate and planned food choices, comparing a group exposed to our stress protocol relative to a control group. Immediate consumption is measured with in-laboratory consumption of low calorie and high calorie snacks; planned consumption is measured with an incentivized food shopping task. The stressfulness of the stress protocol is evaluated using subjective assessments, as well as physiological measurements (heart rate and salivary cortisol levels). We find no evidence of an effect of stress on the nutritional content of immediate or planned food consumption, thus no support for the hypothesis that everyday stressors are a likely explanation for unhealthy food choices.
Does Rewarding with Food Increases its Appeal? with Jan Bauer, Marina Schroeder, Martina Vecchi, Tina Blake, Suzanne Dickson, Plos One (2021), 16(4): e0242461. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0242461
The Formation and Malleability of Dietary Habits: A Field Experiment with Low Income Families, with Noemi Berlin, Jonathan James, Valeria Skafida, forthcoming in the Journal of Political Economy, Microeconomics
We conduct a field experiment with low SES families in the UK and examine the extent to which dietary habits are malleable early on in life. We contrast two interventions: One where we provide all they need to cook 5 healthy meals per week for 12 weeks (recipes, ingredients) and another where we just instruct them to stick to 3 meals per day and 2 healthy snacks. We find that the treated children have a lower Body Mass Index than the control group, and this is true even after two years. The adults on the other hand are completely unaffected.
Job search advice : Many countries ask their job seekers to search broadly (i.e. beyond the occupations they are familiar with). We are interested in developing and testing tools that help job seekers to identify a broad set of occupations they could be suited for and that offer relatively good prospects (no point recommending anyone to work in a mine nowadays). One important question is whether broadening people's search is efficiency improving: Are people finding good jobs (better jobs than they would have found by searching more narrowly and for longer, for example)? Does the broadening of some job seekers' search affect negatively others? It could be that those who broaden their search take the jobs of others. For example, if everyone starts searching for HORECA jobs and shifts away from manufacture, it is possible that workers who used to be in manufacturing benefit from searching in the HORECA sector, but that this has negative effects on those who only searched in that sector. We are working with several employment agencies across Europe to test and evaluate various tools.
Providing Advice to Job Seekers at Low Cost: An Experimental Study on Online Advice with Philipp Kircher, Paul Muller, published in the Review of Economic Studies
Do the Long-Term Unemployed Benefit from Automated Occupational Advice during Online Job Search?, with Philipp Kircher and Paul Muller, IZA Discussion Paper No. 15452, R&R at Economic Journal
Other completed projects
Remember Me – A Field Study on Memory Biases in Academia, with Marina Schroeder, published in the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (2023)
Please see my CV for completed projects and publications
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