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We work together with firms, charitable organizations, and schools to study human behavior in action. To see a complete list of published and working papers, visit Anya's SSRN page. To get a taste of the type of work we do, read Anya's articles in The Conversation.
The Chicago Heights Early Childhood Center project is our largest project. This is a longitudinal study that follows about 1,500 students who were randomized to different early childhood programs in 2010-14. We work closely with Illinois School District 170 on this project. We have funding from the National Institutes of Health to continue annual surveys with these children to learn about the impact of CHECC on education and health outcomes. We also study the development of child economic preferences at CHECC.
We work together with Northgate Gonzalez Market Viva La Salud Health Wellness Program in Los Angeles to study questions about healthy eating choices. Research assistants visit stores across the Los Angeles area to recruit participants for our studies, which include asking participants to choose foods and complete surveys.
The Loyola Marymount Preschool Center Project is conducted in collaboration with Professor Jenn Pate at LMU. This project follows nearly 100 preschool-aged children and their parents and collects information about economic preferences annually.
Our projects on charitable giving explore questions like: what is the impact of thank-you calls on retaining donors? How can firms reduce hassle costs to encourage employees to give to charity? And, what is the impact of suggested gift amounts on charitable giving?
We work in school lunchrooms to study child food choice. Our most recent project explored the impact of combining goal-setting and incentives with a nutrition education program on improving food choice of children at Third Street Elementary in Los Angeles.
We also conduct research using surveys online. This includes studies of charitable fundraising, deception, health insurance choice, and other topics.
Publications
Publications
Chuan, A., List, J. and Samek, A., 2021. Do Financial Incentives Aimed at Decreasing Interhousehold Inequality Increase Intrahousehold Inequality?. Journal of Public Economics, 196.
This paper examines how parents allocate their times when they receive financial incentives. Its findings suggests that incentives increase investment in the target child, but these gains are achieved by parents through substituting time away spent with the child's siblings. This leads to the unintended consequence of increases in intrahousehold inequality. Furthermore, the aggregate gains from the program are overstated when focusing only on target children.
Sadoff, S., Samek, A. and Sprenger, C., 2019. Dynamic Inconsistency in Food Choice: Experimental Evidence from Two Food Deserts. The Review of Economic Studies, 87(4), pp.1954-1988.
In this piece, Sadoff et. al investigate the dynamic inconsistency and commitment demand in food choice and evaluate its welfare consequences. Their findings suggest that commitment demand is negatively correlated with dynamic inconsistency, suggesting that those with larger self control problems are also less likely to be aware of them.
Cappelen, A., List, J., Samek, A. and Tungodden, B., 2020. The Effect of Early-Childhood Education on Social Preferences. Journal of Political Economy, 128(7), pp.2739-2758.
This study examines the casual impact of early-childhood education and children social preferences. The subjects studied were children who at the age of 3 to 4 were randomized into either a full-time preschool, a parenting program, or a control group. Now at the age of 6 to 8, a series of incentivized experiments were conducted on those same children to study their social preferences. The findings suggest that early-childhood education does have a strong causal impact on social preferences.
Forthcoming:
Forthcoming:
"Do Thank-You Calls Increase Charitable Giving? Expert Forecasts and Field Experimental Evidence" by Anya Samek and Chuck Longefield. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics.
"What is Considered Deception in Experimental Economics?" by Anya Samek, Gary Charness and Jeroen van de Ven. Experimental Economics.
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