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Showing 1 – 34 of 34 results.
Self-published

Code for: Optimal Contracting with Altruistic Agents: Medicare Payments for Dialysis Drugs (ICPSR 184263)

Released/updated on: 2024-02-06
We study health care provider agency and optimal payments, considering an expensive medication for dialysis patients. Using Medicare claims data we estimate a structural model of treatment decisions, in which providers differ in their altruism and marginal costs, and this heterogeneity is unobservable to the government. In a novel application of nonlinear pricing methods, we empirically characterize the optimal contracts in this environment. The optimal contracts eliminate medically excessive dosages and reduce expenditures, resulting in approximately $300 million in annual gains from better contracting. This approach could be applied to a broad class of problems in health care payment policy.

Self-published

Code for: Raising the Bar: Certification Thresholds and Market Outcomes (ICPSR 153301)

Released/updated on: 2023-04-14
Certification of sellers by trusted third parties helps alleviate information asymmetries in markets, yet little is known about the impact of a certification's threshold on market outcomes. Exploiting a policy change on eBay, we study how a more selective certification threshold affects the distribution of quality and incumbent behavior. We develop a stylized model that shows how changes in selectivity change the distribution of quality and prices in markets. Using rich data from hundreds of online categories on eBay.com, we find support for the model’s hypotheses.  Our results help inform the design of certification selectivity in electronic and other markets.
Self-published

Data and code for: Ambiguous Air Pollution Effects of China's COVID-19 Lockdown (ICPSR 130381)

Released/updated on: 2021-04-29
This is data and code accompanying the paper "Ambiguous Air Pollution Effects of China's COVID-19 Lockdown".

Paper abstract:
Reductions in ambient pollution have been suggested as a "silver lining" to the COVID-19 Pandemic. We analyze China's pollution monitor data and account for the large annual improvements in air quality following Lunar New Year (LNY), which essentially coincided with lockdowns. With the exception of NO2, China's air quality improvements in 2020 are smaller than we should expect near the pandemic's epicenter: Hubei province. We see smaller improvements in SO2 than expected while ozone concentrations roughly doubled in Hubei. Similar patterns are found for the six provinces neighboring Hubei. We conclude that COVID-19 had ambiguous impacts on China's air quality.
Self-published

Data and Code for "Anticipatory Anxiety and Wishful Thinking" (ICPSR 195781)

Released/updated on: 2024-03-04
Across five experiments (N=1,714), we test  whether people engage in wishful thinking to alleviate anxiety about adverse future outcomes. Participants perform pattern recognition tasks in which some patterns may result in an electric shock or a monetary loss. Diagnostic of wishful thinking, participants are less likely to correctly identify patterns that are associated with a shock or loss. Wishful thinking is more pronounced under more ambiguous signals and only reduced by higher accuracy incentives when participants' cognitive effort reduces ambiguity. Wishful thinking disappears in the domain of monetary gains, indicating that negative emotions are important drivers of the phenomenon. 
Self-published

Data and code for: "Assortative Matching or Exclusionary Hiring? The Impact of Employment and Pay Policies on Racial Wage Differences in Brazil" (ICPSR 130721)

Released/updated on: 2021-08-11
Time period: 2002-01-01--2014-01-01
We measure the effects of firm policies on racial pay differences in Brazil. Nonwhites are less likely to be hired by high-wage firms, explaining about 20% of the racial wage gap for both genders. Firm-specific pay premiums for nonwhites are also compressed relative to whites, contributing another 5% for that gap. A counterfactual analysis reveals that about two-thirds of the under-representation of nonwhites at higher-wage firms is explained by race-neutral skill-based sorting. Non-skill-based sorting and differential wage setting are largest for college-educated workers, suggesting that the allocative costs of discriminatory hiring and pay policies may be relatively large in Brazil.
Self-published

Data and Code for: Can Forward Commodity Markets Improve Spot Market Performance? Evidence from Wholesale Electricity (ICPSR 141521)

Released/updated on: 2023-04-07
Time period: 2009-04-01--2012-11-30
Forward markets are believed to aggregate information about future spot prices and reduce the cost of producing the commodity. We develop a measure of the extent to which forward and spot prices agree in markets with transaction costs. Using this measure, we show that day-ahead prices better reflect real-time prices at all locations in California's electricity market after the introduction of financial trading. We then present evidence suggesting that operating costs and input fuel use fell after the introduction of financial trading on days when the nonconvexities inherent to the production and transmission of electricity are especially relevant.
Self-published

Data and Code for: Decompositions and Policy Consequences of an Extraordinary Decline in Air Pollution from Electricity Generation (ICPSR 112172)

Released/updated on: 2020-10-26
Time period: 2010-01-01--2017-01-01
Using integrated assessment models, we calculate the economic value of the extraordinary decline in emissions from U.S. power plants. Annual local and global air pollution damages fell from $245 to $133 billion over 2010-2017. Decomposition shows changes in emissions rates and generation shares among coal and gas plants account for more of this decline than changes in renewable generation, electricity consumption, and damage valuations. Econometrically estimated marginal damages declined in the East from 8.6¢ to 6¢ per kWh. Marginal damages increased slightly in the West and Texas. These estimates indicate electric vehicles are now cleaner on average than gasoline vehicles.
Self-published

Data and Code for: Enabling or Limiting Cognitive Flexibility? Evidence of Demand for Moral Commitment (ICPSR 180741)

Released/updated on: 2023-01-23
Time period: 2019-05-02--2021-11-30
Moral behavior is more prevalent when individuals cannot easily distort their beliefs self-servingly. Do individuals seek to limit or enable their ability to distort beliefs? How do these choices affect behavior? Experiments with over 9,000 participants show preferences are heterogeneous -- 30% of participants prefer to limit belief distortion, while over 40% prefer to enable it, even if costly. A random assignment mechanism reveals that being assigned to the preferred environment is necessary for curbing or enabling self-serving behavior. Third parties can anticipate these effects, suggesting some sophistication about the cognitive constraints to belief distortion.

Self-published

Data and Code for: GDP-B: Accounting for the Value of New and Free Goods (ICPSR 209901)

Released/updated on: 2025-09-05
The welfare contributions of new goods and free goods are not well-measured in our current national accounts. We derive explicit terms for the contributions of these goods and introduce a new framework and metric, GDP-B which quantifies their benefits. We apply this framework to several empirical examples including Facebook and smartphone cameras and estimate their valuations through incentive-compatible choice experiments. We find that including the gains from Facebook adds 0.05 to 0.11 percentage points to welfare growth per year while improvements in smartphones adds approximately 0.63 percentage points per year.
Self-published

Data and Code for: Government Trust and Covid-19 Vaccination: The Role of Supply Disruptions and Political Allegiances in Sierra Leone (ICPSR 190521)

Released/updated on: 2023-05-22
The mass rollout of a novel adult vaccine mid-pandemic required people worldwide to trust their governments' recommendations and vaccine delivery processes. Vaccine supply disruptions and political allegiances risked undermining this trust. We use data on the universe of Covid-19 vaccines in Sierra Leone to answer two questions. First, whether the relationship between support for Covid-19 vaccination and support for the party in power holds in a low-income environment (Sierra Leone) where trust in vaccines is traditionally high. Second, whether interruptions to vaccine supply reduced take-up of second doses. As with many other countries, we see a relationship between a region's long-term association with the party in power (proxied by ethnicity or language) and the take-up of the Covid-19 vaccine. A year since the start of the Covid-19 vaccination, Temne chiefdoms (associated with the main opposition) have an 18 percentage point lower take-up of Covid-19 adult vaccines compared to 52% take-up in Mende chiefdoms (associated with the ruling party). However, this is not a Covid-19 specific pattern. Temne areas had lower childhood vaccination rates pre-Covid even when the Temne-associated party is in power. This suggests take-up of Covid-19 vaccines in Sierra Leone was not politicized and not undermined by a lack of trust in the party in power. Moreover, we find that those who experienced vaccine stockouts when they were due for their second Covid-19 vaccine were just as likely as those not experiencing stockouts to eventually receive their second dose, even though they had to wait longer to receive it.
This is the data and code accompanying the paper.
Self-published

Data and Code for "Household Search and the Marital Wage Premium" (ICPSR 118064)

Released/updated on: 2021-09-23
Time period: 2000-01-01--2007-01-01
We develop a model where selection into marriage and household search generate a marital wage premium. Beyond selection, married individuals earn higher wages for two reasons. First, income pooling within a joint household raises risk-averse individuals' reservation wages. Second, married individuals climb the job ladder faster, as they internalize that higher wages increase their partner's selectivity over offers. Specialization according to comparative advantage in search generates a premium that increases in spousal education, as in the data. Quantitatively, household search explains 10-33% and 20-58% of the premium for males and females respectively, and accounts for its increase with spousal education.
Self-published

Data and Code for: Is There A VA Advantage? Evidence from Dually Eligible Veterans (ICPSR 192055)

Released/updated on: 2023-10-20
Time period: 2000-01-01--2014-01-01
We study public vs. private provision of health care for veterans aged 65 and older who may receive care provided by the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and in private hospitals financed by Medicare. Utilizing the ambulance design of Doyle et al. (2015), we find that the VA reduces 28-day mortality by 46% (4.5 percentage points) and that these survival gains are persistent. The VA also reduces 28-day spending by 21% and delivers strikingly different reported services relative to private hospitals. We find suggestive evidence of complementarities between continuity of care, health IT, and integrated care.
Self-published

Data and Code for: Self-Persuasion: Evidence from Field Experimentsat International Debating Competitions (ICPSR 148242)

Released/updated on: 2022-03-24
This is data and code accompanying the article Self-Persuasion: Evidence from Field Experimentsat International Debating Competitions

Abstract
Laboratory evidence shows that when people have to argue for a given position, they persuade themselves about the position’s factual and moral superiority. Such self-persuasion limits the po- tential of communication to resolve conflict and reduce polarization. We test for this phenomenon in a field setting, at international debating competitions that randomly assign experienced and mo- tivated debaters to argue one side of a topical motion. We find self-persuasion in factual beliefs and confidence in one’s position. Effect sizes are smaller than in the laboratory, but robust to a one-hour exchange of arguments and a ten-fold increase in incentives for accuracy.
Self-published

Data and Code for Sleep Norms (ICPSR 201982)

Released/updated on: 2024-05-20
Time period: 2023-11-01--2023-11-30
This study documents norms about sleep and studies the effect of norm information on anticipated behavioral change. Participants were either shown a small or large gap between others’ ideal sleep duration (injunctive norm) and actual sleep patterns (descriptive norm). While we find limited effects of injunctive norm information alone, alignment between perceived behavior and societal expectations led to greater intention for longer sleep and earlier bedtimes. Conversely, a large gap between norms and actual behavior heightened interest in advice for improving sleep. These results suggest that understanding and communicating social norms can be crucial in promoting healthy sleep practices.
Self-published

Data and Code for: Start-up Costs and Market Power: Lessons from the Renewable Energy Transition (ICPSR 208143)

Released/updated on: 2025-01-07
Time period: 2014-01-01--2018-01-01
This is the replication package for Start-up Costs and Market Power: Lessons from the Renewable Energy Transition authored by Akshaya Jha and Gordon Leslie.

Abstract: Firms expect to recover the fixed costs required to start production by earning positive operating profits in subsequent periods. We develop a dynamic competitive benchmark that accounts for start-up costs, showing that static markups overstate the rents attributable to market power in an electricity market where generators frequently stop and start production in response to rooftop solar output. We demonstrate that the large-scale expansion of solar capacity can lead to increases in the collective profitability of fossil-fuel plants because competition softens at sunset---plants displaced by solar during the day must incur start-up costs to compete in the evening.
Self-published

Data and Code for: Technical Change and Superstar Effects (ICPSR 162421)

Released/updated on: 2022-10-05
Time period: 1920-01-01--1970-01-01
Technical change that extends market scale can generate winner-take-all dynamics, with large income growth among top earners. I test this ``superstar model'' in the entertainer labor market, where the historic rollout of television creates a natural experiment in scale-related technological change. The resulting inequality changes are consistent with superstar theory: the launch of a local TV station skews the entertainer wage distribution sharply to the right, with the biggest impact at the very top of the distribution, while negatively impacting workers below the star level. The findings provide evidence of superstar effects and distinguish such effects from popular alternative models.
Self-published

Data and Code for the 1918 Influenza Pandemic and Its Lessons for COVID-19 (ICPSR 122804)

Released/updated on: 2022-02-28
This article reviews the global health and economic consequences of the 1918 influenza pandemic, with a particular focus on topics that have seen a renewed interest because of COVID-19. We begin by providing an overview of key contextual and epidemiological details as well as the data that are available to researchers. We then examine the effects on mortality, fertility, and the economy in the short and medium run. The role of non-pharmaceutical interventions in shaping those outcomes is discussed throughout. We then examine longer-lasting health consequences and their impact on human capital accumulation and socioeconomic status. Throughout the paper we highlight important areas for future work.
Self-published

Data and Code for: The Consumer Welfare Effects of Online Ads: Evidence from a 9-Year Experiment (ICPSR 225641)

Released/updated on: 2025-10-28
Research on the effects of online advertising on consumer welfare is limited due to challenges in running large-scale field experiments. We analyze a long-running field experiment on Facebook in which a random subset of users received no ads in their newsfeeds.  Using an incentive - compatible deactivation experiment, we find no significant differences in users’ valuation of Facebook across a representative sample of 53,083 Facebook users in the ads and no ads groups.  Our sample size allows for precise estimates, suggesting that either the disutility of ads is relatively small or that there are offsetting benefits, such as product discovery.
Self-published

Data and Code for: The Long-Run Effects of School Racial Diversity on Political Identity (ICPSR 124601)

Released/updated on: 2021-08-24
Time period: 1990-01-01--2019-01-01
How do early-life experiences shape political identity? We examine the end of race-based busing in Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools, an event that led to large changes in school racial composition. Using administrative data, we compare party affiliation in adulthood for students who had lived on opposite sides of newly-drawn school boundaries. Consistent with the contact hypothesis, we find that a 10-percentage point increase in the share of minorities in a white student's assigned school decreased their likelihood of registering as a Republican by 2 percentage points (12 percent). Our results suggest that schools in childhood play an important role in shaping partisanship.
Self-published

Data and Code for: Underestimating Learning by Doing (ICPSR 212821)

Released/updated on: 2025-10-03
Time period: 2023-01-01--2024-01-01
These files provide the data and code used for the analysis in Underestimating Learning by Doing. The abstract is below:

Many economic decisions, such as whether to invest in developing new skills, change professions, or purchase a technology, benefit from accurate estimation of skill acquisition. We examine the accuracy of such predictions by having study participants predict the speed at which they will master unfamiliar tasks. Across three studies involving two types of tasks and two levels of difficulty, we find systematic underestimation of learning, even after receiving feedback. In a fourth study, participants predicting others' performance showed significantly less underestimation, suggesting that projection bias–over-reliance on immediate perceptions of effort and difficulty–may drive prediction errors.
Self-published

Data and Code for: Wage Insurance and Labor Market Trajectories (ICPSR 139201)

Released/updated on: 2021-04-29
The consequences of job displacement are often severe, with many workers experiencing large earnings declines, protracted periods of unemployment, and other negative outcomes. Since at least the late 1980s, researchers have proposed wage insurance systems to counteract these effects. In such systems, workers whose reemployment wages are lower than their pre-displacement wages receive a temporary subsidy covering a portion of the wage decline.Since 2002, the US Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program has included a wage insurance program available to workers age 50 and over who were laid off in a trade- related displacement. Using administrative worker-level data from Virginia, we provide details on program participation and benefit amounts received linked to long-run earnings histories covering 2005– 2018
Self-published

Growth Mindset Train-the-Trainer Direct Assessment (ICPSR 205261)

Released/updated on: 2024-06-12
Time period: 2024-01-01--2024-06-01
In this project, we assess individuals' pre-post changes in mindset, self-efficacy, and communication resulting from embedding growth mindset training in existing job training programs in Southwestern PA.

We utilize a community-based/community-engaged participatory research design, whereby we design and customize a train-the-trainer session with community partners and leverage adjustable survey templates for data collection.

Short growth mindset trainings are benign behavioral interventions and the data collected is non-identifiable. The survey follows research in education pedagogy that advocates embedding direct pre-post within-subjects assessments in short training sessions (Hershock et al. 2022).
Self-published

The Influence of Cultural Factors on Trust in Automation (ICPSR 100532)

Released/updated on: 2017-10-29
Time period: 2013-01-01--2016-12-31
Human interaction with automation is a complex process that requires both skilled operators and complex system designs to effectively enhance overall performance. Although automation has successfully managed complex systems throughout the world for over half a century, inappropriate reliance on automation can still occur, such as the recent malfunction in Tesla autopilot mechanisms that resulted in a fatality. Research has shown that trust, as an intervening variable, is critical to the development of appropriate reliance on automated systems. Because automation inevitably involves uncertainty, trust in automation is related to a calibration between a user’s expectations and the capabilities of automation. Prior studies suggest that trust is dynamic and influenced by both endogenous (e.g., cultural diversity) and exogenous (e.g., system reliability) variables. While a large body of work on trust in automation has accumulated over the past two decades, a standard measure has remained elusive, with research relying on short, idiosyncratically worded questionnaires. These challenges are exacerbated for measuring trust in automation in non-Western cultures because most research has been limited to North America and Western Europe.

To determine how cultural factors affect various aspects of trust in and reliance on automation, the present research has developed a cross-cultural trust questionnaire and an air traffic control simulator that incorporates a variety of scenarios identified from a review of relevant literature. The measures and tasks have been validated by a crowdsourcing system (Amazon Mechanical Turk), as well as through experimental studies conducted in the U.S., Turkey, and Taiwan, with approximately 1000 participants. Over various phases of data collection and statistical evaluations, a final 18-item Universal Trust in Automation (UTA) instrument was identified that satisfies the stringent tests (including reliability and validity tests and measurement invariance analysis), indicating that the instrument is robust across national cultures and is effective in capturing both predispositions to trust and trust that evolves through use of a system. The findings reveal substantial cultural differences in human trust in automation, which have a significant impact on the design, implementation, and evaluation of automated systems to make them more trustworthy in determining the appropriate trust calibration for optimized reliance across cultures.
Self-published

Mobile Learning During School Disruptions in Sub-Saharan Africa (ICPSR 139741)

Released/updated on: 2021-05-06
School closures due to teacher strikes or political unrest in low-resource contexts can adversely affect children's educational outcomes and career opportunities. Phone-based educational technologies could help bridge these gaps in formal schooling, but it is unclear whether or how children and their families will use such systems during periods of disruption. We investigate two mobile learning technologies deployed in Sub-Saharan Africa: a text message-based application with lessons and quizzes adhering to the national curriculum in Kenya (N = 1.3m), and a voice-based platform for supporting early literacy in Côte d’Ivoire (N = 236). We examine usage and beliefs surrounding unexpected school closures in each context via system log data and interviews with families about their motivations and methods for learning during the disruption. We find that mobile learning is used as a supplement for formal and informal schooling during disruptions with equivalent or higher intensity, as parents feel responsible to ensure continuity in schooling.
Self-published

The Rise and Fall of Pellagra in the American South (ICPSR 107147)

Released/updated on: 2019-02-09
Time period: 1900-01-01--1950-01-01
This is the replication package for "The Rise and Fall of Pellagra in the American South" by Karen Clay, Ethan Schmick, and Werner Troesken The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 79, No. 1.
Self-published

U.S. County-Level Natality and Mortality Data, 1915-2007 (ICPSR 100229)

Released/updated on: 2016-09-16
Time period: 1915-01-01--2007-12-31
This dataset contains cells for counts of vital events by U.S. county and year from 1915-2007.  Vital events include the live births, infant deaths, and all-age deaths. When sources allow, data are disaggregated by county of occurrence, county of residence, and race.
Self-published

US Television Signal 1930-1970 (ICPSR 175861)

Released/updated on: 2022-07-28
The data provides information on the availability of television signal during the US Television rollout. Specifically, it includes data on the number of TV channels in US mainland MSAs between 1948 and 1960 and decadal Commuting Zone level data on TV access between 1930 and 1970. It also includes information on the signal of stations that were meant to launch but were held back by FCC rollout restrictions.