· In Nature Human Behavior, Noam Angrist and Stefan Dercon argue that much more attention needs to be paid to policy implementation in education. An open-access working paper this is based on is here. “We find large gaps between policy intent and policy implementation in practice…We find policies are often designed sensibly and are not naive; rather most of the policy-practice gap can be explained by ineffective service delivery. Our findings highlight the need to prioritize implementation science in education to close the gap between policy and practice.”
· J-PAL have a new policy brief summarizing market access interventions that help connect firms and entrepreneurs to markets. They look at 15 RCTs and 4 non-experimental evaluations of interventions like training in marketing skills, linking firms with other firms, encouraging more participation in tender processes, and connecting firms and consumers through digital market infrastructure.
· David Deming discusses his recent work on the results of a nationally representative survey in the U.S. on the use of generative AI at home and work. The results show surprising levels of use “In August 2024, 39.4% of adults ages 18-64 said they use generative AI, either at work or at home. 32 percent said they used it at least one day in the week prior to being surveyed, and nearly one in nine (10.9 percent) said they used it every day last week.” The most common uses are writing, administrative tasks, interpreting/translating/summarizing, and searching for facts and information. There is also an interesting “behind the scenes” discussion at the end of the post about how the survey only happened because he gave a talk and met some researchers who were running out of funding, which he was able to provide through Harvard.
· I once wrote a little paper testing whether tortillas are Giffen goods in Mexico (they weren’t), and so am always interested to see new candidates for this rare good type. Garth Heutel in the Southern Economic Journal has a new paper that proposes that theme park rides at amusement parks meet the criteria. “Under prix fixe theme park pricing, the rides are not free; the price of a ride is not in dollars but in the time spent waiting in the queue. The law of demand dictates that when the wait time of a ride increases, the number of people willing to wait for the ride should decrease. The opposite will be true if demand for the ride exhibits Giffen behavior. The intuition for Giffen behavior for a theme park ride is the following. Given the budget constraint (i.e., the time constraint), when a ride's wait time is longer than expected, visitors are more willing to ride it. This is because the income effect from the higher wait time (the visitor is “poorer” in terms of the total number of rides they can experience in the park's fixed operating hours) makes the demand increase for rides that are inferior goods. Though a price effect also exists (the relative price of this ride has increased compared to other rides), if the income effect dominates then we see Giffen behavior.”…”Giffen behavior among theme park rides can be explained by a utility function with a subsistence constraint, as I demonstrate in the model below. Obviously, there is not literally subsistence demand for rides (you don't need to ride rides to live, like you need to eat and drink), but theme park guests may act as if one existed. For example, guests may demand a minimum number of rides during a day at the park to feel that they “got their money's worth.””….” On average, a 10-min increase in the difference between the actual wait time of a ride and its ex-ante expected wait time increases the probability of riding it by about three to five percentage points. This relationship holds under a variety of specifications and different controls, including controlling for weather, for overall park wait times, and for a set of user, ride, date, and time-of-day fixed effects. While true on average across all rides, I find that the effect predominantly arises from the rides that are the least desirable, that is, not the headliner rides like roller coasters.”
· The Australian Centre for Evaluation, part of the Treasury department, has a brief explainer on pre-registration and PAPs for RCTs up, along with a template for PAPs – aimed at helping those working on public policy in the country to use these tools – with a couple of examples of plans for behavioral interventions done in Australia. Great to see policy interest in using these tools.
· The International Economic Association has a request for proposals on interventions to advance women in economics in the Global South. They will prioritize research proposals that focus on any of these four countries: Argentina, Colombia, Ghana, and Mexico. However, they are open to proposals from other developing countries as well. Deadline November 15.
Join the Conversation