Browsing by Department "Economics"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5

Collaborative Research: Identity, Stereotype Threat, and Black College Student Success
Economics; TAMU; https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14641/634; National Science Foundation
The proposed studies will explore, in depth, heterogeneity in the vulnerability of black college students to stereotype threat, and the way in which incentives can mitigate the impact of the threat. Stereotype threat occurs when members of a social group, in a given situation, feel themselves to be at risk of confirming a negative stereotype about their group and therefore perform less well, especially on important or difficult tasks. The study will contribute to knowledge about stereotype threat by identifying factors that contribute to or mitigate the threat and the consequences of stereotype threat vulnerability, and by developing a policy designed to combat its effects on black college students. It addresses one of the most important questions in the study of human capital investment today, which is why black students underperform and as a result are more likely to fail to complete a college degree. In this proposal the principal investigators plan a series of lab experimental studies that will explore the interaction between stereotype threat and two types of incentives: piece rates and prizes. The project will explore the relationship among a set of key factors that are likely to be responsible for the differences in vulnerability to stereotype threat, and carefully explore the impact of incentives and their interaction with stereotype threat. The proposal has high policy relevance because it can inform the development of interventions to enhance the performance of black students enrolled at institutions with varying demographic distributions.
Collaborative Research: Using Field Experiments to Understand Household Barriers to Energy Efficiency in Alaska
Economics; TAMU; https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14641/432; National Science Foundation
Energy efficiency is a policy goal of first magnitude. For individuals, it can imply significant welfare gains. For the country as a whole, it can imply not only improvement in energy independence but also attaining environmental goals. The research team proposes to investigate the reasons why individuals fail to adopt seemingly adaptive conservation technologies and behaviors. The proposal is based on a series of studies that combine field experiments and data analysis of large policies initiatives in the state of Alaska. Heating costs throughout the polar North stress community resilience. Cold is extreme, hydrocarbon prices volatile, and local opportunity to adjust cash income to price shocks limited. Energy conservation would appear adaptive, and the State of Alaska provides substantial subsidies to facilitate household energy conservation. Despite this, relatively few adopt energy efficient technologies to reduce home heating costs. The research team proposes three related studies to understand why. The project explores individual decision rules, the role of cash payoffs, information, and nuisance and other hidden costs of making investments to reduce energy for space and hot water heat. The project is focused on discovering opportunities to design better policy. Taking seriously the complexity of household decision-making, it will produce new information on engineering models, behavioral models, program effectiveness and policy alternatives. It will generate the first publically available data on household heating oil use -- a critical input to Northern energy policy. The project works collaboratively with local stakeholders, agencies, and academic communities, which will produce lessons for building future effective partnerships. Finally, the project entails substantial outreach and training with local participants through direct participation in the project in combination with educational opportunities. The first part of the research project jointly analyzes participant records in Alaska's Home Energy Rebate Program (HERP), which subsidizes investments to reduce space and hot water heat, and gas utility billing records. Detailed program and energy consumption data permit assessment of both program-predicted and actual household payoffs, point to investments that may occur for reasons other than energy conservation, and indicate cost-effective investments not pursued. This analysis will reveal the way decisions about conservation are made in the face of relevant information and their effectiveness in producing energy savings. The second part of the research measures the comparative importance of hidden, non-pecuniary costs of completing the HERP's initial home energy assessment. We will conduct a field experiment that systematically isolates and removes participant costs and uncertainty from the task. Also, the incentives to gather technology information will give causal evidence of the importance of information on HERP participation and completion. The third part of the research project measures behavioral impacts of providing rural consumers real-time information on their consumption and expenditures for heat. Essentially all rural Alaskan households use heating oil as primary heat source, but consumer ability to map realized costs of behavior is limited: Costs are observed only when the fuel oil tank is refilled, which may occur as little as 2-3 times a year. By deploying new heating oil metering technology developed by the Alaska Center for Energy and Power specifically for remote rural application, we assess behavioral effects of a dramatic increase in information. This study will generate the first Alaska dataset of measured residential heating oil demand. The proposal will significantly improve knowledge of the complex reasons why seemingly adaptive energy efficiency investments are not made. The research team will access information not previously available to researchers, and conduct experiments to create counterfactuals that observational data cannot deliver, to: better understand the motivations of adopters; recalibrate engineering models of building energy use to incorporate human behavior; measure the causal effect of pecuniary incentives in the adoption of energy savings technologies; produce a novel dataset of actual demand for heating oil in rural Alaska; determine the importance of hidden costs as a barrier to energy conservation program participation.
COVID-19: RAPID: Collaborative Research: The Impact of COVID-19 on Norms, Risk-taking, Information, and Trust
Economics; TAMU; https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14641/634; National Science Foundation
The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has hit countries around the world hard and is likely to have both short-run and long-run impacts on health behaviors, social norms, and trust in government and other organizations. In the short run, governments and health organizations provide extensive information and recommend behavior to avoid contracting the disease and spreading it to others. This research involves surveys to figure out whether and to what extent people follow recommendations and change behavior. Because the research team has been following a sample of university students for several years, the team already knows a lot about them, and this facilitates an understanding of variation in compliance with recommendations. For example, risk-tolerance and trust in organizations are likely to matter. The team is exploring how people process information about the virus, and how that affects their beliefs about the risks to themselves and others. The researchers also are examining the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on social norms, and how those change over time. The second wave of the study looks for longer run impacts. The results of this study will be useful in shaping future policies and communications about health risks, especially during epidemics and other health crises. The researchers make use of previous samples of subjects to test the impact of COVID-19 information and recommendations on behavior, social norms, trust in each other and institutions, and risk-tolerance. They have four areas of study. The first is how people process ?noisy? information in the context of COVID-19. Prior research by a team member has shown that some individuals tend to misunderstand such information to their benefit. The teams adapt the methodology and protocol of the prior work to examine how individuals interpret COVID-19 information, and how this affects their beliefs about their own vulnerabilities. Second, the team studies the impact of COVID-19 on norms of behavior, including those directly related to the virus (social distancing, hand-washing), as well as norms of trust, sharing and in-group favoritism that may be shifting or newly emerging in response to COVID19. Prior work by a team member developed a methodology for eliciting social norms, and has shown that norms evolve in response to social influence. Third, they explore the impact of COVID-19 on interpersonal trust and trust in institutions, which significantly impacts willingness to follow government and organizational recommendations. Prior work by team members used incentivized games and surveys to study trust and reciprocity in natural disaster settings. Finally, they look at risk perception and risk taking related to COVID-19. Using incentivized measures of risk tolerance, and survey measures of domain-specific risk perceptions and behavior, the team explores the relationship between risk aversion and behavior, but also how the advent of COVID-19 has changed preferences for risk-taking. In these ways prior knowledge about the subjects provides an opportunity to study the impact of a national health catastrophe on information processing, social norms, trust and reciprocity and risk-taking. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: Escaping Secular Stagnation with Unconventional Policy
Economics; TAMU; https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14641/634; National Science Foundation
This research project uses laboratory experiments to understand periods of prolonged low economic growth, as distinct from cyclical low-growth periods. The goal of the project is to simulate an economy in the laboratory within which we can trigger a permanent decline in economic activity along with falling prices, and then to explore various policy interventions that have the potential to repair the stagnant economy. In particular, the project focuses on what actions policy makers can take (monetary and fiscal policy) to restore the experimental economy to full employment. The research explores whether the timing and contextual communication of policy can influence the efficacy of policy. The laboratory experiments in this project are designed to explore secular stagnation in a closed economy. Specifically, the research implements a recent formalization of secular stagnation that uses an overlapping-generations structure to break the representative agent assumption and allow for endogenous bouts of activity at the zero lower bound (ZLB). Exogenous deleveraging shocks can trigger spending gluts that create deflation, and lead to a secular stagnation equilibrium, which can be unique. The objective of the research is to identify whether deflationary and inflationary equilibria emerge when they are unique, and to explore equilibrium selection when multiple equilibria exist. Additionally, the project investigates the ability of monetary policy, in the form of inflation targeting, and fiscal policy, consisting of "helicopter drops" financed using lump-sum taxes levied on the middle-aged cohort in our experimental economy, to pull the economy out of a deflationary equilibrium following a debt-deleveraging shock. Both potential remedies improve economic conditions through an expectations channel by making households more optimistic about future economic conditions. Finally, the project studies the effect of variation in both the timing and contextual communication of policy. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: The Impact of Exogenous and Endogenous Information Acquisition on Giving
Economics; TAMU; https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14641/555; National Science Foundation
An important question in the study of charitable organizations is what motivate people to contribute more? This proposed research will use theory and experiments to investigate whether providing more information about the value of the proposed public good at the fundraising stage will encourage more donations. The researchers will develop a theoretical model which predicts that providing more information to people who do not generally donate will encourage them to donate, while providing more information to those who normally donate decreases their donations. The researchers will use new and sophisticated methods to test this theory. Early test results confirm the predictions of the theory. The results of this research project are useful for formulating fundraising policies for charities---share more information with communities which would otherwise not donate. The research results also provide guidance on how governments can generate support for providing public goods. The research project also contributes to US global leadership in economics research by supporting graduate student research in economics and thus increases US's research capital. This proposal will use theoretical and experimental methods to investigate the impact of providing more information about the value of a public good on voluntary cooperative giving. The research first develops a theoretical model to investigate the effects of providing information about the project's value on expected contributions. The model predicts that the generosity level of the population plays an important role in how agents respond to information; information has the potential to increase average contributions in less generous populations but may decrease it in more generous populations. The PIs will then use laboratory experiments to test this model as well as measure people's willingness to pay for such information. Preliminary experimental results confirm the theoretical predictions. The results of the research project have important policy implications for how charities provide information on the outcomes of their activities to generate more donations. It also provides guidance on how governments may generate support for the provision of public and merit goods. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.