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. 

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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). 

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. 

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. 


Other completed projects

Please see my CV for completed projects and publications

 

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