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Essays in Development and Behavioral Economics
Essays in Development and Behavioral Economics
상세정보
- 자료유형
- 학위논문 서양
- 최종처리일시
- 20260202103516
- ISBN
- 9798288862090
- DDC
- 150
- 저자명
- Ho, Yuen.
- 서명/저자
- Essays in Development and Behavioral Economics
- 발행사항
- [Sl] : University of California, Berkeley, 2025
- 발행사항
- Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2025
- 형태사항
- 231 p
- 주기사항
- Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 87-01, Section: B.
- 주기사항
- Advisor: Magruder, Jeremy;Kaur, Supreet.
- 학위논문주기
- Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 2025.
- 초록/해제
- 요약This dissertation includes four essays at the intersection of development and behavioral economics. A unifying theme across these essays is the exploration of how social environments shape economic decision making. A variety of research methods are employed throughout, including implementing field experiments in real-world contexts, leveraging naturally occurring experiments using administrative datasets, and synthesizing interdisciplinary literature across psychology and economics. Of particular interest is how these dynamics affect low-income and marginalized populations, from manufacturing workers in Tanzania, to the psychology of those living in poverty, to marginalized social and political identities.The first chapter, "Selection and Sorting when Supervisors have Discretion," coauthored with Yihong Huang, begins from the observation that firms are social organizations. In particular, the relationships between workers and their supervisors are an important part of how employees experience their day to day jobs. These relationships can enhance firm productivity, such as through improved information and trust. Yet, these relationships can also lead to biases and preferential treatment. In practice, almost all firms rely on supervisors to select and motivate workers. But what are the benefits and costs of doing so?To make progress on these questions, we partner with a large garment manufacturing firm in Tanzania to implement a series of field experiments to examine decision making when supervisors have discretion. In particular, we focus on a challenge common to all large organizations: how to select future leaders. In a first field experiment, supervisors are asked to refer workers for promotion to new managerial positions. During the referral process, we randomize whether supervisors face financial incentives based on the quality of their referrals. In a complementary experiment, workers decide whether to apply for the new managerial openings. During the application process, we randomly vary whether supervisor selection is emphasized on the application forms that workers receive.Our results show that discretion crowds in supervisors' private information about the managerial quality of workers. Supervisors use private information beyond what the firm could infer from existing administrative data, workers' self-assessments, or coworker referrals. However, discretion also generates costs for firms. Supervisor referrals are not perfectly aligned with the firm's objectives, and supervisors show preferences consistent with gender bias and favoritism. Furthermore, discretion is disliked by workers and reduces the likelihood that workers apply for promotion, directly reducing the number of high quality candidates that the firm receives. Despite the costs of discretion, supervisors select workers with significantly higher measured managerial ability relative to more objective selection methods. Taken together, the results suggest that firms face meaningful trade-offs in using subjective methods, which select workers with higher managerial quality, against more objective methods, which are transparent and preferred by workers.The exploration of the social dynamics within firms extends to social interactions more generally, particularly the importance of implicit norms. In the second chapter, "Breaking the Spiral of Silence," also coauthored with Yihong Huang, we explore how social norms and limited attention jointly interact to shape political discourse. We study this in the context of self-censorship on college campuses, where there are both strong social norms governing political expression and where free ideological debate is believed to be critical for learning and innovation.Using a dynamic model and field experiment with UC Berkeley college students, we first establish that social norms shape public discourse on college campuses. Students who hold socially appropriate views are more likely to express their views publicly. In contrast, students who hold socially inappropriate views are more likely to self-censor. This pattern of public expression leads other students to increase their beliefs about the popularity of the socially appropriate views, which further discourages the expression of opposing views, creating a self-fulfilling cycle. Next, we find that inattention to silence is a key mechanism that perpetuates such a spiral and enables misperceptions to persist. When we experimentally increase attention to the number of students who stay silent on a topic, students form more accurate beliefs about the true level of dissent and become more likely to voice dissent to others. With sufficient attention to silence, the spiral of silence is broken and misperceptions are corrected. Extensions using data from real public forums and nationally representative surveys suggest our findings apply not only to college campuses but to political discourse more broadly. Taken together, these results have implications for any decision-making process that either explicitly or implicitly takes public opinion into account. We have been invited to revise and resubmit this chapter for publication at the Journal of Political Economy.Social interactions are governed not only by implicit norms but also by relative comparisons. People inevitably rank themselves against others. When are such comparisons beneficial and when are they harmful? Estimating the effects of relative rank on outcomes poses an empirical challenge because rank is often endogenously determined. In the third chapter "Gender Differences in Competition: The Role of Rank effects" I exploit quasi-exogenous variation in relative rank in a high-stakes, real world setting to study the causal effects of rank on performance. In competitive swimming, swimmers are usually divided into sub-groups, or heats, based on their ex-ante rankings. The difference in entry times between any two swimmers ex-ante is quite small, often tenths of seconds, but swimmers just above the threshold will be placed in a faster heat, as the last ranked swimmer, while swimmers just below the threshold will be placed in a slower heat, as the first ranked swimmer. Exploiting this quasi-exogenous variation in relative rank, I use a regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal effects of rank on performance.Standard economic models would predict no effect of group rank on performance in this setting, as it is rank in the overall competition rather than rank in a specific heat that matters for tournament outcomes. In contrast, the results show there are significant gender differences in response to rank. Women significantly improve their performance when they are ranked first in a slower heat relative to when they are ranked last in a faster heat, whereas there is no comparable effect of rank on performance for men. Taken together, the results suggest there are significant gender differences in response to competition incentives in a real-world, high stakes setting.Across these essays, I seek to understand both how an individual's circumstances shape their psychology and how their psychology in turn shapes their decisions and their circumstances. In the final chapter, "The Psychology of Poverty: Current and Future Directions," coauthored with Ye Rang Park, Kristina Hallez, Supreet Kaur, Mahesh Srinivasan, and Jiaying Zhao, we synthesize evidence across both psychology and economics on the psychological impacts of poverty and their potential role in perpetuating poverty. We do so using an organizing framework comprising four sets of mechanisms: cognitive function, mental health, beliefs, and preferences. We discuss the strength of the evidence supporting both how poverty affects these four mechanisms, and how these four mechanisms in turn affect poverty. From our synthesis, we determine that the existing evidence has clearly established proof of concept that psychological factors exist in the experience of and response to poverty. However, there is still a lack of evidence on whether these effects are meaningful in magnitude and lead to the perpetuation of poverty. From our review, we identify promising future directions for research which could help close these evidence gaps, with important implications for the design of poverty reduction policies.
- 초록/해제
- 요약This chapter was published in Current Directions in Psychological Science in December 2024.Taken together, these essays highlight the myriad ways in which social identities and social contexts shape economic behavior. Better understanding these patterns helps us to form more accurate models of human behavior, with implications for how to effectively design policies ranging from workplace incentives to poverty reduction programs. There is much that we do not understand about the interplay between social psychology and economics, and what a gift it is to seek the answers.
- 일반주제명
- Behavioral sciences
- 일반주제명
- Gender studies
- 키워드
- Decision making
- 키워드
- Discretion
- 키워드
- Inattention
- 키워드
- Poverty
- 기타저자
- University of California, Berkeley Agricultural & Resource Economics
- 기본자료저록
- Dissertations Abstracts International. 87-01B.
- 전자적 위치 및 접속
- 로그인 후 원문을 볼 수 있습니다.
MARC
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■040 ▼aMiAaPQ▼cMiAaPQ
■0820 ▼a150
■1001 ▼aHo, Yuen.
■24510▼aEssays in Development and Behavioral Economics
■260 ▼a[Sl]▼bUniversity of California, Berkeley▼c2025
■260 1▼aAnn Arbor▼bProQuest Dissertations & Theses▼c2025
■300 ▼a231 p
■500 ▼aSource: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 87-01, Section: B.
■500 ▼aAdvisor: Magruder, Jeremy;Kaur, Supreet.
■5021 ▼aThesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 2025.
■520 ▼aThis dissertation includes four essays at the intersection of development and behavioral economics. A unifying theme across these essays is the exploration of how social environments shape economic decision making. A variety of research methods are employed throughout, including implementing field experiments in real-world contexts, leveraging naturally occurring experiments using administrative datasets, and synthesizing interdisciplinary literature across psychology and economics. Of particular interest is how these dynamics affect low-income and marginalized populations, from manufacturing workers in Tanzania, to the psychology of those living in poverty, to marginalized social and political identities.The first chapter, "Selection and Sorting when Supervisors have Discretion," coauthored with Yihong Huang, begins from the observation that firms are social organizations. In particular, the relationships between workers and their supervisors are an important part of how employees experience their day to day jobs. These relationships can enhance firm productivity, such as through improved information and trust. Yet, these relationships can also lead to biases and preferential treatment. In practice, almost all firms rely on supervisors to select and motivate workers. But what are the benefits and costs of doing so?To make progress on these questions, we partner with a large garment manufacturing firm in Tanzania to implement a series of field experiments to examine decision making when supervisors have discretion. In particular, we focus on a challenge common to all large organizations: how to select future leaders. In a first field experiment, supervisors are asked to refer workers for promotion to new managerial positions. During the referral process, we randomize whether supervisors face financial incentives based on the quality of their referrals. In a complementary experiment, workers decide whether to apply for the new managerial openings. During the application process, we randomly vary whether supervisor selection is emphasized on the application forms that workers receive.Our results show that discretion crowds in supervisors' private information about the managerial quality of workers. Supervisors use private information beyond what the firm could infer from existing administrative data, workers' self-assessments, or coworker referrals. However, discretion also generates costs for firms. Supervisor referrals are not perfectly aligned with the firm's objectives, and supervisors show preferences consistent with gender bias and favoritism. Furthermore, discretion is disliked by workers and reduces the likelihood that workers apply for promotion, directly reducing the number of high quality candidates that the firm receives. Despite the costs of discretion, supervisors select workers with significantly higher measured managerial ability relative to more objective selection methods. Taken together, the results suggest that firms face meaningful trade-offs in using subjective methods, which select workers with higher managerial quality, against more objective methods, which are transparent and preferred by workers.The exploration of the social dynamics within firms extends to social interactions more generally, particularly the importance of implicit norms. In the second chapter, "Breaking the Spiral of Silence," also coauthored with Yihong Huang, we explore how social norms and limited attention jointly interact to shape political discourse. We study this in the context of self-censorship on college campuses, where there are both strong social norms governing political expression and where free ideological debate is believed to be critical for learning and innovation.Using a dynamic model and field experiment with UC Berkeley college students, we first establish that social norms shape public discourse on college campuses. Students who hold socially appropriate views are more likely to express their views publicly. In contrast, students who hold socially inappropriate views are more likely to self-censor. This pattern of public expression leads other students to increase their beliefs about the popularity of the socially appropriate views, which further discourages the expression of opposing views, creating a self-fulfilling cycle. Next, we find that inattention to silence is a key mechanism that perpetuates such a spiral and enables misperceptions to persist. When we experimentally increase attention to the number of students who stay silent on a topic, students form more accurate beliefs about the true level of dissent and become more likely to voice dissent to others. With sufficient attention to silence, the spiral of silence is broken and misperceptions are corrected. Extensions using data from real public forums and nationally representative surveys suggest our findings apply not only to college campuses but to political discourse more broadly. Taken together, these results have implications for any decision-making process that either explicitly or implicitly takes public opinion into account. We have been invited to revise and resubmit this chapter for publication at the Journal of Political Economy.Social interactions are governed not only by implicit norms but also by relative comparisons. People inevitably rank themselves against others. When are such comparisons beneficial and when are they harmful? Estimating the effects of relative rank on outcomes poses an empirical challenge because rank is often endogenously determined. In the third chapter "Gender Differences in Competition: The Role of Rank effects" I exploit quasi-exogenous variation in relative rank in a high-stakes, real world setting to study the causal effects of rank on performance. In competitive swimming, swimmers are usually divided into sub-groups, or heats, based on their ex-ante rankings. The difference in entry times between any two swimmers ex-ante is quite small, often tenths of seconds, but swimmers just above the threshold will be placed in a faster heat, as the last ranked swimmer, while swimmers just below the threshold will be placed in a slower heat, as the first ranked swimmer. Exploiting this quasi-exogenous variation in relative rank, I use a regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal effects of rank on performance.Standard economic models would predict no effect of group rank on performance in this setting, as it is rank in the overall competition rather than rank in a specific heat that matters for tournament outcomes. In contrast, the results show there are significant gender differences in response to rank. Women significantly improve their performance when they are ranked first in a slower heat relative to when they are ranked last in a faster heat, whereas there is no comparable effect of rank on performance for men. Taken together, the results suggest there are significant gender differences in response to competition incentives in a real-world, high stakes setting.Across these essays, I seek to understand both how an individual's circumstances shape their psychology and how their psychology in turn shapes their decisions and their circumstances. In the final chapter, "The Psychology of Poverty: Current and Future Directions," coauthored with Ye Rang Park, Kristina Hallez, Supreet Kaur, Mahesh Srinivasan, and Jiaying Zhao, we synthesize evidence across both psychology and economics on the psychological impacts of poverty and their potential role in perpetuating poverty. We do so using an organizing framework comprising four sets of mechanisms: cognitive function, mental health, beliefs, and preferences. We discuss the strength of the evidence supporting both how poverty affects these four mechanisms, and how these four mechanisms in turn affect poverty. From our synthesis, we determine that the existing evidence has clearly established proof of concept that psychological factors exist in the experience of and response to poverty. However, there is still a lack of evidence on whether these effects are meaningful in magnitude and lead to the perpetuation of poverty. From our review, we identify promising future directions for research which could help close these evidence gaps, with important implications for the design of poverty reduction policies.
■520 ▼aThis chapter was published in Current Directions in Psychological Science in December 2024.Taken together, these essays highlight the myriad ways in which social identities and social contexts shape economic behavior. Better understanding these patterns helps us to form more accurate models of human behavior, with implications for how to effectively design policies ranging from workplace incentives to poverty reduction programs. There is much that we do not understand about the interplay between social psychology and economics, and what a gift it is to seek the answers.
■590 ▼aSchool code: 0028.
■650 4▼aBehavioral sciences
■650 4▼aGender studies
■653 ▼aBehavioral economics
■653 ▼aDecision making
■653 ▼aDiscretion
■653 ▼aGender differences
■653 ▼aInattention
■653 ▼aPoverty
■690 ▼a0501
■690 ▼a0602
■690 ▼a0511
■690 ▼a0733
■71020▼aUniversity of California, Berkeley▼bAgricultural & Resource Economics.
■7730 ▼tDissertations Abstracts International▼g87-01B.
■790 ▼a0028
■791 ▼aPh.D.
■792 ▼a2025
■793 ▼aEnglish
■85640▼uhttp://www.riss.kr/pdu/ddodLink.do?id=T17357466▼nKERIS▼z이 자료의 원문은 한국교육학술정보원에서 제공합니다.


