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Showing 1 – 15 of 15 results.
Self-published

Code for: Digital Addiction (ICPSR 163822)

Released/updated on: 2023-04-07
Time period: 2020-03-01--2020-07-01
Many have argued that digital technologies such as smartphones and social media are addictive. We develop an economic model of digital addiction and estimate it using a randomized experiment. Temporary incentives to reduce social media use have persistent effects, suggesting social media are habit forming. Allowing people to set limits on their future screen time substantially reduces use, suggesting self-control problems. Additional evidence suggests people are inattentive to habit formation and partially unaware of self-control problems. Looking at these facts through the lens of our model suggests that self-control problems cause 31 percent of social media use.
Self-published

Code for "The Effect of Deactivating Facebook and Instagram on Users’ Emotional State" (ICPSR 237316)

Released/updated on: 2026-03-31
Time period: 2020-09-01--2020-12-01
We estimate the effect of social media deactivation on users’ emotional state in two large randomized experiments before the 2020 U.S. election. People who deactivated Facebook for the six weeks before the election reported a 0.060 standard deviation improvement in an index of happiness, depression, and anxiety, relative to controls who deactivated for just the first of those six weeks. People who deactivated Instagram for those six weeks reported a 0.041 standard deviation improvement relative to controls. Exploratory analysis suggests the Facebook effect is driven by people over 35, while the Instagram effect is driven by women under 25.
Self-published

Fake News in the 2016 Election (ICPSR 101153)

Released/updated on: 2017-11-17
Time period: 2016-08-01--2016-11-07
This database gathers a list of fake news articles circulated in the three months before the 2016 election identified by Snopes, PolitiFact, and BuzzFeed. The titles, URLs, and the number of times that each article was shared on Facebook by early December 2016 are recorded.
Self-published

Fake News in the 2016 Election (ICPSR 101177)

Released/updated on: 2017-11-21
Time period: 2016-08-01--2016-11-07
This database gathers a list of fake news articles circulated in the three months before the 2016 election identified by Snopes, PolitiFact, and BuzzFeed. The titles, URLs, and the number of times that each article was shared on Facebook by early December 2016 are recorded.
Self-published

Replication Archive for: The Welfare Effects of Social Media (ICPSR 112081)

Released/updated on: 2020-02-28
The rise of social media has provoked both optimism about potential societal benefits and concern about harms such as addiction, depression, and political polarization. In a randomized experiment, we find that deactivating Facebook for the four weeks before the 2018 US midterm election (i) reduced online activity, while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends; (ii) reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization; (iii) increased subjective well-being; and (iv) caused a large persistent reduction in post-experiment Facebook use. Deactivation reduced post-experiment valuations of Facebook, suggesting that traditional metrics may overstate consumer surplus.
Self-published

Replication data for: Are Consumers Poorly Informed about Fuel Economy? Evidence from Two Experiments (ICPSR 114709)

Released/updated on: 2019-10-13
It is often asserted that consumers are poorly informed about and inattentive to fuel economy, causing them to buy low-fuel economy vehicles despite their own best interest. This paper presents evidence on this assertion through two experiments providing fuel economy information to new vehicle shoppers. Results show zero statistical or economic effect on average fuel economy of vehicles purchased. In the context of a simple optimal policy model, the estimates suggest that current and proposed US fuel economy standards are significantly more stringent than needed to address the classes of imperfect information and inattention addressed by our interventions.
Self-published

Replication data for: Evaluating Behaviorally Motivated Policy: Experimental Evidence from the Lightbulb Market (ICPSR 112964)

Released/updated on: 2019-10-12
Imperfect information and inattention to energy costs are important potential motivations for energy efficiency standards and subsidies. We evaluate these motivations in the lightbulb market using a theoretical model and two randomized experiments. We derive welfare effects as functions of reduced-form sufficient statistics capturing economic and psychological parameters, which we estimate using a novel within-subject information disclosure experiment. The main results suggest that moderate subsidies for energy-efficient lightbulbs may increase welfare, but informational and attentional biases alone do not justify a ban on incandescent lightbulbs. Our results and techniques generate broader methodological insights into welfare analysis with misoptimizing consumers. (JEL D12, D83, H21, H31, L67, Q41, Q48)
Self-published

Replication data for: How Do Electricity Shortages Affect Industry? Evidence from India (ICPSR 112983)

Released/updated on: 2019-10-12
We estimate the effects of electricity shortages on Indian manufacturers, instrumenting with supply shifts from hydroelectric power availability. We estimate that India's average reported level of shortages reduces the average plant's revenues and producer surplus by 5 to 10 percent, but average productivity losses are significantly smaller because most inputs can be stored during outages. Shortages distort the plant size distribution, as there are significant economies of scale in generator costs and shortages more severely affect plants without generators. Simulations show that offering interruptible retail electricity contracts could substantially reduce the impacts of shortages. (JEL D24, L60, L94, O13, O14, Q41)
Self-published

Replication data for: Should We Tax Sugar-Sweetened Beverages? An Overview of Theory and Evidence (ICPSR 116391)

Released/updated on: 2019-12-07
Taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages are growing in popularity and have generated an active public debate. Are they a good idea? If so, how high should they be? Are such taxes regressive? People in the United States and some other countries consume remarkable quantities of sugar-sweetened beverages, and the evidence suggests that this generates significant health costs. Building on recent work, we review the basic economic principles that determine the socially optimal sugar-sweetened beverage tax. The optimal tax depends on (1) externalities, or uninternalized health system costs from diseases caused by sugary drink consumption; (2) internalities, or costs consumers impose on themselves by consuming too many sugary drinks due to poor nutrition knowledge and/or lack of self-control; and (3) regressivity, or how much the financial burden and the internality benefits from the tax fall on the poor. We summarize the empirical evidence about the key parameters that determine how large the tax should be. Our calculations suggest that sugar-sweetened beverage taxes are welfare enhancing and indeed that the optimal sugar-sweetened beverage tax rate may be higher than the 1 cent per ounce rate most commonly used in US cities. We end with seven concrete suggestions for policymakers considering a sugar-sweetened beverage tax.
Self-published

Replication data for: Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election (ICPSR 113992)

Released/updated on: 2019-10-12
Following the 2016 US presidential election, many have expressed concern about the effects of false stories ("fake news"), circulated largely through social media. We discuss the economics of fake news and present new data on its consumption prior to the election. Drawing on web browsing data, archives of fact-checking websites, and results from a new online survey, we find: 1) social media was an important but not dominant source of election news, with 14 percent of Americans calling social media their "most important" source; 2) of the known false news stories that appeared in the three months before the election, those favoring Trump were shared a total of 30 million times on Facebook, while those favoring Clinton were shared 8 million times; 3) the average American adult saw on the order of one or perhaps several fake news stories in the months around the election, with just over half of those who recalled seeing them believing them; and 4) people are much more likely to believe stories that favor their preferred candidate, especially if they have ideologically segregated social media networks.
Self-published

Replication data for: The Short-Run and Long-Run Effects of Behavioral Interventions: Experimental Evidence from Energy Conservation (ICPSR 112692)

Released/updated on: 2019-10-11
We document three remarkable features of the Opower program, in which social comparison-based home energy reports are repeatedly mailed to more than six million households nationwide. First, initial reports cause high-frequency "action and backsliding," but these cycles attenuate over time. Second, if reports are discontinued after two years, effects are relatively persistent, decaying at 10-20 percent per year. Third, consumers are slow to habituate: they continue to respond to repeated treatment even after two years. We show that the previous conservative assumptions about post-intervention persistence had dramatically understated cost effectiveness and illustrate how empirical estimates can optimize program design.
Self-published

Replication data for: The Welfare Effects of Misperceived Product Costs: Data and Calibrations from the Automobile Market (ICPSR 114833)

Released/updated on: 2019-10-13
This analysis exploits new data from the Vehicle Ownership and Alternatives Survey, which elicits beliefs over the financial benefits of owning higher fuel economy vehicles. The data are used to test for underestimation and to document evidence of "MPG Illusion": consumers think as if fuel costs scale linearly in miles per gallon instead of gallons per mile. Counterfactuals suggest that the MPG Illusion reduces welfare by less than $4 per new vehicle. Furthermore, even the most severe plausible underestimation of the financial benefits of fuel economy cannot account for the consumer welfare gains attributed to fuel economy standards.
Self-published

Replication data for: The Welfare Effects of Nudges: A Case Study of Energy Use Social Comparisons (ICPSR 113728)

Released/updated on: 2019-10-12
"Nudge"-style interventions are often deemed successful if they generate large behavior change at low cost, but they are rarely subjected to full social welfare evaluations. We combine a field experiment with a simple theoretical framework to evaluate the welfare effects of one especially policy-relevant intervention, home energy social comparison reports. In our sample, the reports increase social welfare, although traditional evaluation approaches overstate gains because they ignore significant costs incurred by nudge recipients. Overall, home energy report welfare gains might be overstated by $620 million. We develop a prediction algorithm for optimal targeting; this approach would double the welfare gains.