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A list of all the posts and pages found on the site. For you robots out there is an XML version available for digesting as well.
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Posts
Blog Post number 4
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Blog Post number 3
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Blog Post number 2
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Blog Post number 1
Published:
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media
De Grote Boze Markt
Published in De Standaard, 2020
Political polarisation impedes the public policy response to COVID-19
Published in Vox EU, 2020
Here’s What a Ton of Capitol Rioters Had in Common
Published in The Daily Beast, 2021
From coastal cities to rural towns, breadth of George Floyd protests, most peaceful, captured by data
Published in USA Today, 2021
Biden’s plea for masks will fail. Blame political polarization.
Published in Washington Post, 2021
Science skepticism appears to be an important predictor of non-compliance with COVID-19 shelter-in-place policies
Published in PsyPost, 2022
New data paints a picture of a year of war in Ukraine
Published in Fast Company, 2023
Cell phone data and radar technology show how utterly disrupted life in Ukraine has beenÑand how incredibly resilient its people are.
portfolio
Portfolio item number 1
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Short description of portfolio item number 1
Portfolio item number 2
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publications
The Impact of ECB Quantitative Easing on Income Inequality in the Netherlands: a First Assessment
Published in Bank- en Financiewezen / Revue Bancaire et Financiere, 2018
This article looks at the impact of the 2015 European Central Bank unconventional monetary policy (UMP) on income inequality in the Netherlands. To that end, it uses a panel survey from the Dutch central bank to decompose the contributions of selected UMP channels to the change in household income between two periods (11-13 / 14-16). It finds that UMP's effect through these channels was strongly equalizing. The only two other papers on the topic find similar results for other euro area countries.
Science Skepticism Reduces Compliance with COVID-19 Shelter-in-Place Policies
(joint with Adam Brzezinski, Valentin Kecht, Austin Wright)
Published in Nature Human Behaviour, 2021
Physical distancing reduces transmission risks and slows the spread of COVID-19. Yet compliance with shelter-in-place policies issued by local and regional governments in the United States is uneven and may be influenced by science skepticism and attitudes towards topics of scientific consensus. Using county-day measures of physical distancing derived from cellphone location data, we demonstrate that the proportion of people who stay at home after shelter-in-place policies go into effect is significantly lower in counties with a high concentration of science skeptics. These results are robust to controlling for other potential drivers of differential physical distancing, such as political partisanship, income, education and COVID severity. Our findings suggest public health interventions that take local attitudes toward science into account in their messaging may be more effective.
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Unmasking Partisanship: Polarization undermines public response to collective risk
(joint with Maria Milosh, Marcus Painter, Konstantin Sonin, Austin Wright)
Published in Journal of Public Economics, 2021
Political polarization and competing narratives can undermine public policy implementation. Partisanship may play a particularly important role in shaping heterogeneous responses to collective risk during periods of crisis when political agents manipulate signals received by the public (i.e., alternative facts). We study these dynamics in the United States, focusing on how partisanship has influenced the use of face masks to stem the spread of COVID-19. Using a wealth of micro-level data, machine learning approaches, and a novel quasi-experimental design, we document four facts: (1) mask use is robustly correlated with partisanship; (2) the impact of partisanship on mask use is not offset by local policy interventions; (3) partisanship is the single most important predictor of local mask use, not COVID severity or local policies; (4) Trump's unexpected mask use at Walter Reed on July 11, 2020 significantly increased social media engagement with and positive sentiment towards mask-related topics. These results unmask how partisanship undermines effective public responses to collective risk and how messaging by political agents can increase public engagement with mask use.
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Public response to government alerts saves lives during Russian invasion of Ukraine
(joint with Austin Wright, Mark Polyak)
Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Forthcoming), 2023
War is the cause of tremendous human suffering. To reduce such harm, governments have developed tools to alert civilians of imminent threats. Whether these systems are effective remains largely unknown. We study the introduction of an innovative smartphone application that notifies civilians of impending military operations developed in coordination with the Ukrainian government after the Russian invasion. We leverage quasi-experimental variation in the timing of more than 3,000 alerts to study civilian sheltering behavior, using high-frequency geolocation pings tied to 17 million mobile devices, 60% of the connected population in Ukraine. We find that, overall, civilians respond sharply to alerts, quickly seeking shelter. These rapid postalert changes in population movement attenuate over time, however, in a manner that cannot be explained by adaptive sheltering behavior or calibration to the signal quality of alerts. Responsiveness is weakest when civilians have been living under an extended state of emergency, consistent with the presence of an alert fatigue effect. Our results suggest that 35 to 45% of observed civilian casualties were avoided because of public responsiveness to the messaging system. Importantly, an additional 8 to 15% of civilian casualties observed during the later periods of the conflict could have been avoided with sustained public responsiveness to government alerts. We provide evidence that increasing civiliansÕ risk salience through targeted government messaging can increase responsiveness, suggesting a potential policy lever for sustaining public engagement during prolonged episodes of conflict.
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talks
Talk 1 on Relevant Topic in Your Field
Published:
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Conference Proceeding talk 3 on Relevant Topic in Your Field
Published:
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teaching
Teaching experience 1
Undergraduate course, University 1, Department, 2014
This is a description of a teaching experience. You can use markdown like any other post.
Teaching experience 2
Workshop, University 1, Department, 2015
This is a description of a teaching experience. You can use markdown like any other post.
wps
The Cost of Staying Open: Voluntary Social Distancing and Lockdowns in the US
(joint with Adam Brzezinski, Valentin Kecht)
Published in Economics Series Working Papers 910, University of Oxford, Department of Economics, 2020
In combating the spread of COVID-19, some governments have been reluctant to adopt lockdown policies due to their perceived economic costs. Such costs can, however, arise even in the absence of restrictive policies, if individuals' independent reaction to the virus slows down the economy. This paper finds that imposing lockdowns leads to lower overall costs to the economy than staying open. We combine detailed location trace data from 40 million mobile devices with difference-in-differences estimations and a modification of the epidemiological SIR model that allows for societal and political response to the virus. In that way, we show that voluntary reaction incurs substantial economic costs, while the additional economic costs arising from lockdown policies are small compared to their large benefits in terms of reduced medical costs. Our results hold for practically all realistic estimates of lockdown efficiency and voluntary response strength. We quantify the counterfactual costs of voluntary social distancing for various US states that implemented lockdowns. For the US as a whole, we estimate that lockdowns reduce the costs of the pandemic by 1.7% of annual GDP per capita, compared to purely voluntary responses.
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Using Mobile Device Traces to Improve Near-Real Time Data Collection During the George Floyd Protests
(joint with Austin Wright)
Published in SSRN, 2020
This research note presents a method for using mobile device trace data to improve collection of data on spontaneously erupting protest activity and related events. Based on this method, it presents a highly granular dataset of such activity for the George Floyd Protests in the United States. We use anonymous aggregated mobile device trace data to identify device surges: anomalous changes in the number of devices in a small geographic area, consistent with the assembly of a large number of individuals. Preliminary estimates from ongoing data collection of protest sites and scale are presented. Establishing better measures of where and when protests occur across and within cities improves researchers' understanding of the downstream political and social consequences of mobilization.
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Work Effort and the Cycle: Evidence from Survey Data.
(joint with Vivien Lewis)
Published in Deutsche Bundesbank Discussion Paper (Forthcoming), 2020
We use data from the World Values Survey and the Work Orientations Survey to analyse the cyclical nature of work effort and attitudes to work effort. Our aim is to test two competing theories of labor effort, the labor hoarding view and the Shapiro and Stiglitz (1984) shirking model. Self-reported work effort is found to be strongly procyclical, while attitudes to effort move slightly countercyclically. We provide evidence for the presence of labor hoarding by showing how the cyclicality of effort changes with the strictness of employment protection legislation. Finally, we document heterogeneity in effort cyclicality across occupations and individuals.
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Isolation and Insurrection: How Partisanship and Political Geography Fueled January 6, 2021
(joint with Konstantin Sonin, Austin Wright)
Published in CEPR Discussion Paper 18209, 2021
We develop a novel approach for estimating spatially dispersed community-level participation in mass protest. This methodology is used to investigate factors associated with participation in the March to Save America event in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021. This study combines granular location data from more than 40 million mobile devices with novel measures of community-level voting patterns, the location of organized hate groups, and the entire georeferenced digital archive of the social media platform Parler. We find evidence that partisanship, socio-political isolation, proximity to chapters of the Proud Boys organization, and the local activity on Parler are robustly associated with protest participation. Our research fills a prominent gap in the study of collective action: identifying and studying communities involved in mass-scale events that escalate into violent insurrection.
Media:
The Daily Beast, BFI, UChicago News, Salon
https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/BFI_WP_2021-13.pdf
On the Non-Identification of Revenue Production Functions
Published in Bank of England Staff Working Paper No 1015, 2023
Production functions are potentially misspecified when revenue is used as a proxy for output. I formalize and strengthen this common knowledge by showing that neither the production function nor Hicks-neutral productivity can be identified with such a revenue proxy. This result holds under the standard assumptions used in the literature for a large class of production functions, including all commonly used parametric forms. Among the prevalent approaches to address this issue, only those that impose assumptions on the underlying demand system can possibly identify the production function.
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https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/working-paper/2023/on-the-non-identification-of-revenue-production-functions
Free Discontinuity Regression: With an Application to the Economic Effects of Internet Shutdowns
(joint with Florian Gunsilius)
Published in arXiv, 2023
Discontinuities in regression functions can reveal important insights. In many contexts, like geographic settings, such discontinuities are multivariate and unknown a priori. We propose a non-parametric regression method that estimates the location and size of discontinuities by segmenting the regression surface. This estimator is based on a convex relaxation of the Mumford-Shah functional, for which we establish identification and convergence. We use it to show that an internet shutdown in India resulted in a reduction of economic activity by 25Ð35%, greatly surpassing previous estimates and shedding new light on the true cost of such shutdowns for digital economies globally.
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https://github.com/Davidvandijcke/fdr
Return to Office and the Tenure Distribution
(joint with Florian Gunsilius, Austin Wright)
Published in University of Chicago, Becker Friedman Institute for Economics Working PaperÊ2024-56, 2024
With the official end of the COVID-19 pandemic, debates about the return to office have taken center stage among companies and employees. Despite their ubiquity, the economic implications of return to office policies are not fully understood. Using 260 million resumes matched to company data, we analyze the causal effects of such policies on employeesÕ tenure and seniority levels at three of the largest US tech companies: Microsoft, SpaceX, and Apple. Our estimation procedure is nonparametric and captures the full heterogeneity of tenure and seniority of employees in a distributional synthetic controls framework. We estimate a reduction in counterfactual tenure that increases for employees with longer tenure. Similarly, we document a leftward shift in the seniority distribution towards positions below the senior level. These shifts appear to be driven by employees leaving to larger firms that are direct competitors. Our results suggest that return to office policies can lead to an outflow of senior employees, posing a potential threat to the productivity, innovation, and competitiveness of the wider firm.
Media:
Washington Post, Time, Forbes, Fortune, Inc.com, Cheddar, The Register, Ars Technica, Computerworld, KCBS Radio