Devin Pope
@Devin_G_Pope
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Professor of behavioral science and economics at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business
Joined December 2013
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Wow, the amount of variation in this variable across countries is staggering (HT
@tylercowen
):
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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
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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:
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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)
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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
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Advice that David Card gave me when I was a graduate student: “Your comparative advantage as a grad student is finding previously unused datasets”.
He gave me this advice when I came to him with a bad idea involving census data.
Still good advice for grad students.
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It seems like Qualtrics could play an important role in limiting researcher fraud. As a researcher, I would love to be able to post a data file that is somehow certified by Qualtrics as the original file (maybe it is posted by Qualtrics).
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Part 2 – Religion in America: Evidence from Cellphone Data
Based on the 2.1M cellphones in my main sample that I discussed in “Part 1”, here is the estimated number of worshippers in the US each week from April 2019 to Feb 2020:
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I'm a sucker for a beautiful descriptive graph. Here is a nice one produced and published by
@UpshotNYT
today showing the average tip amount during the pandemic in NYC using data from the Square and Toast apps:
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I taught a PhD class with Emir Kamenica and
@R_Thaler
. One student wrote in their course evaluation:
Emir: precise
Richard: funny
Devin: good with students
Of course we were all quite offended. What is the psychology that makes this form of compliment hurt?
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A very nice paper coming out in AEJ: Applied showing the financial value of majoring in economics relative to other disciplines (e.g. psychology).
The 2 key graphs are below.
Authors:
@zbleemer
and
@ProfAMehta
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I am feeling a bit of whiplash. Serious question for my editor friends at the JPE: Wouldn't a good first step to limit "penalizing authors who lack such connections" be to ask editors not to submit to the journal while currently serving as an editor?
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I am very excited to be releasing a new NBER working paper today entitled "Racial Disparities in Voting Wait Times: Evidence from Smartphone Data" coauthored with
@MKeithChen
,
@k_haggag
, and
@rarohla
.
Link to (ungated) paper:
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Good behavioral science:
There are two clocks in the classroom I am teaching in at Booth. The clock that the teacher faces is 2-3 minutes fast. The clock that the students face is 2-3 minutes slow. Perfect.
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I am hiring a full time “pre-doc” research professional to start this summer. If you are interested in behavioral and applied economics and wanting to eventually go to grad school, please consider applying here:
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The 90% effective number is huge. With a sample size of 94 confirmed cases, I wanted to know the confidence interval on effectiveness. Here it is:
95% confidence interval: 82.6-95.5% effective
99% confidence interval: 80.0-96.6% effective
Pretty good!!
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Yesterday I received an email announcing the "just accepted" articles at the Journal of Political Economy. Two of the eight articles announced were coauthored by a current JPE editor including an article by editor Jim Heckman and coauthors (both good articles by the way).
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I'm excited to finally release my paper measuring religious worship attendance using cellphone data. I tweeted some early results from the paper several months ago. But you can now read the whole thing here:
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I was reminded today of a cool paper by Karlsson, Loewenstein, and Seppi.
They find when the stock market goes up, people login to see the gains to their retirement account. When the market goes down, people don’t login so as to avoid seeing their losses. “The Ostrich Effect”
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This paper showing that the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally was a super spreader event is getting a lot of attention. Given it is in my wheelhouse, I decided to give it a careful read.
My take: reasonable paper, but the effects are almost surely way smaller than reported.
New
@SDSUCHEPS
paper by Dhaval Dave
@FriedsonAndrew
@Drew_McNichols
& Joe Sabia ("Contagion Externality of Super-spreader") finds Sturgis Motorcycle Rally was a local & nationwide spreader of COVID-19. Estimated public health cost: ~$12B
See:
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Economics and Religion: Post
#4
I started by showing strong correlations between religiosity and positive outcomes like happiness. But is it causal?
There are two *amazing* papers that estimate the causal impact of increasing Muslim religious intensity on subjective well being.
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Offering $$ to give blood is *incredibly* effective. This has been shown over and over and the more $$ you offer, the more effective it is. Here is a review in
@ScienceMagazine
by the experts on this topic,
@NicoLacetera
,
@Mario_Macis
, and
@RobertSlonim
:
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Part 1 – Religion in America: Evidence from Cellphone Data
Sorry, but this first post has to be boring. I need to tell you about the 2.1M cellphones that make up my main sample.
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To my 21 loyal Twitter followers: you may enjoy this NYT op-ed I wrote on how colleges can improve admissions.
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My heart breaks for George Floyd and many other black men and women who continue to be targets of racism. As an academic economist (and as a human being), I need to do better. Our research needs to move far beyond just reflexively asking “is it statistical or taste-based?”
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Did declining religious participation in the late 1980s lead to increased deaths of despair (e.g. suicides) in the early 1990s?
A new paper out this week tackles this question. I summarize the paper and give my take below.
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Economists have carefully tested for racial discrimination in many important domains (getting a loan, job callbacks, etc.). But, relatively little research has looked at small, everyday sleights (angry/suspicious looks, condescending verbal exchanges, etc.).
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Using GPS data that tracks millions of smartphone users, we document voting wait times in polling places around the US during the 2016 Pres Election. We find a large racial gap: voters in all-black neighborhoods wait 29% longer than those in all-white areas (see figure below).
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Overall, my takeaway is that the average net impact of childbirth on happiness and satisfaction is probably pretty small. This could in part be due to offsetting effects of positive (eg happiness) and negative emotions (eg stress).
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I helped write an oped in the NYTimes this morning with great colleagues Oeindrila Dube, Kate Baicker, and
@m_sendhil
. We show how the risk of virus transmission various significantly across and within industry sectors.
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In addition to a drop in GPA, black/Hispanic high school students who live near a police killing are less likely to graduate and enroll in college (diff-in-diff estimates).
Great paper that changes how I think about the impact police shootings can have on local residents.
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How hard is it in each state to reach a live rep for help to file for benefits like UI, Snap, and Medicaid?
In a new paper, Dube, Mullainathan (
@m_sendhil
), and I use a mystery shopping approach to see how states stack up. Here is a summary graph.
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Twitter: Only 14% of the variance in SAT scores can be explained by SES. Basically unrelated!
Applied economist: One variable explains 14% of the variation! I should recheck my code - that seems way too high.
"less than 14% of the variance in SAT scores can be explained by SES in two massive and representative samples"
"Stop saying that the SAT is an income test. It is not."
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Ok - I must tweet something on this. What is Curry's 3-point percentage when he is in perfect conditions (not guarded, warm but not tired, etc.)? Could it really be as high as 90%? Let's say it is 90%, the chances of him hitting 105 in a row (video below) is about 1 in 50,000!
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Do you have project management experience and enjoy behavioral economics? Consider applying to come work with me and others at Amazon to create value with behavioral economics. More detail can be found here:
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I'm surprised by how people make assumptions about me based on my research. For example, many people have made comments about how I must hate religion, which if you knew me you would know is far from the truth. Has this happened to others?
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Economics and Religion: Post 2
In my last post, I discussed the positive correlation between religiosity and happiness. I argued that the relationship is surprisingly strong and robust.
Before moving on to discuss causality, I wanted to show just a bit more correlational data.
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@colin_fraser
@instrumenthull
Cool. That matches how humans choose random numbers too. See this post by
@DataColada
:
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Other than money, what motivates people to do great (and terrible) things that are perhaps understudied in economics? My list:
Belonging
Sense of purpose/meaning
Religion
Honor and loyalty
Curiosity
Thrill seeking
Role models and celebrities
Power
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Latter-day Saints (Mormons): ~1.4M in attendance each week. 2 large drops for online conferences. No spikes in attendance for Easter or Christmas.
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Do you know someone who is financially-strapped with bored kids? Our family decided to create Care Boxes that contain 14 kid activities (one per day for 2 weeks) to give away. My kids helped choose things to include like a stomp rocket, yo-yo, sidewalk chalk, card game, etc.
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I would never have predicted such large findings, but have read the paper closely and am totally convinced. The effects are entirely driven by black and Hispanic students experiencing a decrease in their GPAs when the police killing was of a black or Hispanic individual.
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Vox has put together a nice review of the racial discrimination literature in America that
@m_sendhil
, Oeindrila Dube, and I helped with. Evidence that Black Americans are treated differently than White Americans in a host of important domains is undisputable in my mind.
Decades’ worth of discrimination studies collected by researchers at the
@UChicago
and shared with Vox, spotlight how pervasive systemic racism is for Black Americans.
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If you want to follow along, my plan is to post a set of figures each day for the next 10 days that describe what religious worship attendance in the US looks like. Hopefully a fun way to show results from a very descriptive paper. Feedback is of course welcome!
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College goes to Final Four --> 6% increase the following year in high school students who send their SAT score to college (14% increase for black high school students). Figure below shows increase in scores sent for the year of sports success and 1, 2, and 3 years after success.
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3 levels of understanding how marginal tax rates work:
Level 1: Everyone is going to have to pay X% on all their income.
Level 2: People making above a certain amount of money are going to have to pay X% on all their income.
Level 3: How they actually work.
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The two graphs below provide intuition for how a simple behavioral pricing strategy can increase profits at Lyft by $160M/year.
This is a new paper of mine with coauthors John List (
@Econ_4_Everyone
), Ian Muir, and Greg Sun forthcoming in ReStud.
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I found this little guy at the University Chicago this morning. I think he deserves a
#sludge
award.
@R_Thaler
@CassSunstein
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As an aside, I think we should be grateful to researchers who report findings that don't look great for their main thesis as opposed to cherry picking those findings and punishing authors for them.
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We have a new paper released today in Science showing how monetary incentives can increase vaccination take up. See thread below for details!
Coauthors:
@campos_mercade
,
@meier_armando
,
@f_h_schneider
,
@meier_steph
, and
@ErikWengstrom
🤔 Does paying people $24 to get vaccinated increase COVID-19 vaccinations?
....
Yes! In a large experiment, vaccination rates increase from 72 to 76 percent.
Our new paper in Science:
“Monetary Incentives Increase COVID-19 Vaccinations”
Thread 👇
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Barely passing an AP exam in high school leads younger siblings to be more likely to take that same exam.
The sibling spillover effect is strongest going from sister to sister.
Fun finding with amazing data by
@odedgurantz
,
@jonisaacsmith
, and Hurwitz.
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Coauthors and I just released a working paper on “inaccurate statistical discrimination”. Included is a lit review of empirical papers that test for discrimination at 10 top Econ journals. Some interesting facts below.
@alexoimas
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Wait, tweet supply just exogenously declined without a proportionate decline in tweet demand? As an economist, I feel like I must step up to fill the vacuum.
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The drop in crime for first-time fathers is not as large, but still dramatic (see below).
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I want to respond to one specific critique of my recent religion paper.
@lymanstoneky
, who I respect quite a bit, provides a good-faith response to the paper (well, almost good faith - I think calling the paper "fraud" and "fake" is a bit too far)
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I just saw a fantastic paper presented by Kevin Schnepel. Using data from Texas, he shows that penal code reform caused defendants on a particular date to discontinuously became more likely to be put in a probation program rather than be convicted of a felony (see graph below).
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Things just got real. My research assistant can’t download humidity data from the NOAA’s website because of govt shutdown. I have so many weather papers waiting to be written...
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@dilipsoman
Fair point. Maybe they need less “pop culture behavioral econ” and more carefully taught behavioral econ. They just come into class with ideas like “I don’t plan to pay my employees anymore, I’m just going to use nudges instead”. (I’m exaggerating a bit)
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Ugh, I hate it when academics say stuff like this.
@NateSilver538
definitely is a behavioral scientist of a sort and academics look petty and insecure when dismissing people in situations like this.
With all due respect to
@NateSilver538
, he is not an expert on the psychology of vaccine confidence. He is a poll aggregator and political pundit. He is not an infectious disease specialist, epidemiologist, vaccinologist, virologist, immunologist, or behavioral scientist.
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College reaches Sweet 16 --> ~5% increase the next two years in high school students who send their SAT scores to college (~10% increase for black students). Figure below shows increase 1, 2, and 3 years after sports success. Thanks to
@TheEconomist
for graphic of our results.
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And then the authors look at salary post graduation and find that the impact of declaring as an econ major (due to just hitting the threshold) was an increase in salary by nearly 50% relative to those who didn't study economics (due to just missing the threshold):
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An ingenious behavioral intervention: the “I Voted” sticker.
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I can’t tell you how often I go to
@sdellavi
‘s website to get some info from his behavioral econ slides (or the many years of tests and problem sets that are posted). An incredible resource for all behavioral economists.
Thanks
@raogautam
. All: Feel free to browse and download my PhD lectures on behavioral economics, send me an email if they are useful or you have comments / corrections
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They say you should never trust an economist who mows their own lawn.
I don’t know… that felt pretty good.
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Voter turnout in Minnesota is ~58%, but only ~34% in Mississippi. Is this driven by different types of people or different types of places? If someone moved from MS to MN, would they vote more?
A new AER paper uses a mover-design to shed light.
Authors: Cantoni and
@VinPons
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I came across this sign while traveling. Someone is a bit confused about how to use left-digit bias...
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In the US, not having a religious affiliation is most common among the less educated. My guess is that this is surprising to a lot of academics.
Doing interviews for 20 Myths, I often get asked what's the biggest falsehood I see when it comes to data about religion.
It's education leads people away from religion.
14 survey waves. Total N of ~550K.
In every single survey the less educated are more likely to be nones
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Understanding and communicating Covid risk is *super* hard.
For example, in terms of personal risk, should I worry more about dying in a car accident over the next month or dying from a Covid infection?
Here are a few comparisons:
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Maybe economists had more to say? Maybe just more time on their hands?
I also calculated these separately for male (1098) and female (265) economists. Below is the graph in levels.
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Everyone wants to understand why COVID is impacting some places more than others. With appropriate caveats about how I am not a public health researcher, I produce a couple of figures below that seem interesting if not informative.
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These figures show how cellphone data can be used to create estimates for week-to-week attendance in the US as a whole and week-to-week attendance for a particular religion, measures that are *very* hard to find through traditional data sources.
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I bought a new phone this week. I thought I would tweet about how ridiculous it is to buy AppleCare.
Price of 64g iPhone 11 Pro: $999
Price of full coverage (including theft/loss): $299
Yikes - the insurance coverage is nearly 1/3 the price of the phone!!
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It seems to me that as a country we owe Robert Mueller our gratitude. His investigation was relatively fast and leak-free. He gave up two years of his life and in return his character was repeatedly maligned. Regardless of the outcome, I for one am very appreciative.
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Me: Hey kids, look at this award I won that shows how much people respect your dad.
Kids: Can we throw it off the balcony?
Me: Sure
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22% of Americans claim to attend worship services weekly, but I find that only 3% attend at least 36 out of 47 weeks. (I classify someone as “weekly” even if they miss one Sunday a month for sickness, travel, etc.).
Tomorrow I’ll post these same figures separately by religion.
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Super exciting. David Card was a dissertation advisor for me and seemingly every other applied student at Berkeley in the early 2000s. His generosity in giving feedback and helping others is inspiring. Well deserved!
BREAKING NEWS:
The 2021 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded with one half to David Card and the other half jointly to Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens.
#NobelPrize
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A friend asked me if I could get in trouble for tweeting about Hong Kong given that universities receive a lot of tuition money from Chinese students. Interesting question.
Nice to be able to say “no way”.
A reminder to me of how lucky academics are with freedom of expression.
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Conclusion - Religion in America: Evidence from Cellphone Data
Thanks everyone for the comments and thoughts on the religion graphs I've been posting. For this final post, I want to provide a link to all the threads and also boost some of the best critiques I've received.
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Beautiful graph showing the recent domination of computer chess engines like AlphaZero and Stockfish. I guess this graph scares some people, but it makes me optimistic about the future of humans!
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Using 1.8 million American responses, they find that people with kids at home are typically happier and more satisfied with life than those without. However, people with kids at home are also more likely to be married, richer, and more religious. So these may act as confounds.
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In education, there is something called "summer learning loss" or "summer slide". The idea is that kids progress in math and reading during the school year, but then regress over the summer.
I just read up on that literature and the best work is characterized in the figure below.
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My new article in the
@washingtonpost
- A large gender gap in math confidence based on SAT takers.
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The NBA All-Star 3-point contest is this weekend. Does the contest let players shoot enough so that the best shooter usually wins or is the winner mostly decided by luck due to random noise? I ran a simulation to find out. Here are the results:
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Seeing Benford’s law on a number pad never gets old (U Chicago candy machine edition).
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Part 5 – Religion in America: Evidence from Cellphone Data
In this post, I show the geographic variation in religious attendance based on cellphone data. Here is a state-level graph that shades by fraction of people in each state who attend at least once:
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When you observe someone who doesn’t wash their hands while in the bathroom, do you think:
1. Crazy that they wouldn’t wash their hands!
Or
2. Crazy that they wouldn’t wash their hands when someone is watching!
For me it is definitely the second. Social norms are strong.
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Today I received an email noting a new paper in JEL coauthored by Heckman about the "Tyranny of the Top Five". It is a nice article discussing problems with the top 5 journals in economics including a discussion of the problem of home bias for journals (see quote below).
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50% of the elementary and secondary schools in Texas had Spring Break the week leading up to school closures. Did counties in Texas (and 3 other states) where schools "shut down" one week earlier due to Spring Break have fewer coronavirus cases 3 weeks later?
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I am incredibly excited that
@m_sendhil
is joining
@ChicagoBooth
. It will be fun to have Sendhil close by as he produces great articles like this one that just came out.
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