Economics: Research Guide

This paper examines the role of personality traits-specifically the Big Five and locus of control-in shaping economic outcomes in countries of the Global South. While such traits have been extensively studied in OECD contexts, they remain underexplored in Global South settings where most of the world's population resides. The article reviews how personality traits are measured in diverse cultural contexts, their associations with economic outcomes, and the structural and individual-level factors that shape them. It also evaluates evidence on the effectiveness of interventions aimed at altering personality traits. Findings suggest that traits like conscientiousness, emotional stability, and a..

We examine how information about local labor market conditions shapes search and employment outcomes for Indian job seekers. Participants were randomly shown information about either job postings, job applicants, or both from a popular job portal for their preferred city and occupation. Treated respondents are more likely to be employed seven months later. This overall effect varies considerably by baseline employment status. Among the initially employed, treatments reduce search off the portal and increase employment, with suggestive evidence of higher persistence in baseline jobs. In contrast, among the initially unemployed, treatments increase search activity but do not raise employment. ..

Research examining artificial intelligence's (AI) role in food choice largely asks whether AI helps people make better decisions, treating it as an information source that improves the accuracy or personalization of recommendations. We suggest that this framing captures one point on a broader continuum of how AI impacts food decisions. AI can act, often simultaneously, as an advisor consulted for information, a decision partner that actively shares in constructing the choice, or an ambient influence that shapes what appears desirable and available before deliberate choice begins. As AI becomes more conversational and more embedded across the food environment, this continuum is increasingly p..

Research examining artificial intelligence's (AI) role in food choice largely asks whether AI helps people make better decisions, treating it as an information source that improves the accuracy or personalization of recommendations. We suggest that this framing captures one point on a broader continuum of how AI impacts food decisions. AI can act, often simultaneously, as an advisor consulted for information, a decision partner that actively shares in constructing the choice, or an ambient influence that shapes what appears desirable and available before deliberate choice begins. As AI becomes more conversational and more embedded across the food environment, this continuum is increasingly p..

This paper proposes a two-dimensional trajectory controller (2DTC) for autonomous vehicles (AVs) operating on a lane-free freeway. Without relying on inter-vehicle communication, each AV independently determines its acceleration and steering in real time. The 2DTC is formulated as a receding-horizon optimal control problem (OCP) with nonlinear dynamics, costs, and constraints. The OCP is discretized and solved using the continuation/GMRES method to obtain the optimal control values. Strategic interactions between AVs are captured through a level-k game theory model. The performance of the 2DTC is evaluated through both microscopic and macroscopic analyses. Microscopic simulations show that t..

How does social proximity between borrowers and lenders influence informal lending terms in rural areas of the Global South? We answer this question using a unique dataset collected in 2020-2021 in rural South India. We examine four dimensions of loan agreements: interest rates, collateral, services provided by lenders and borrowers. We analyse the role of social proximity (i.e., homophily and strength of ties) in determining credit terms using loan-level probit models. We find two key results. First, social proximity operates as an ambivalent resource: while homophily and strong ties reduce the financial cost of borrowing, they are also associated with reciprocal obligations. Second, the be..

Background Poverty is associated with depression and anxiety among adolescents, but evidence of interventions that prevent adolescent depression and anxiety among adolescents living in poverty is weak. Interventions either focus on reducing poverty or addressing depression and anxiety, but an approach that combines both may offer larger benefit. This multi-site parallel pilot cluster randomised controlled trial (cRCT) evaluates the feasibility and acceptability of a selective preventive intervention for depression and anxiety that simultaneously intervenes on both poverty and self-regulation among adolescents living in urban poverty. Methods The study takes place in Bogotá (Colombia), Kathm..

Given the high and uncertain costs of long-term care (LTC), insurers commonly rely on medical underwriting to determine eligibility. We examine the impact of the rollout of the Long-Term Care Insurance Partnership (LTCIP) programme—a joint federal–state initiative aimed at promoting private LTCI in the United States by shifting catastrophic costs to Medicaid and reducing insurers' risk exposure—using a difference-in-differences framework with heterogeneous effects by pre-LTCIP health status and chronic conditions. Using longitudinal data, we find that LTCIP increased LTCI take-up among both healthier and higher-risk individuals, with a positive effect of 2.1 percentage points among ind..

Effectuation theory seeks to explain how entrepreneurs act under Knightian uncertainty through non-predictive control. However, the mechanism through which this control operates remains unclear, and the theory has been criticized for being akin to a random walk. This paper addresses this issue by integrating effectuation theory with a design science perspective on entrepreneurship. We conceptualize venture creation as the iterative design of an artifact whose structure evolves through decomposition and recomposition. Drawing on the property of near-decomposability, we propose that the artifact provides the structural continuity linking successive entrepre-neurial actions while enabling local..

Emotional intelligence (EI) has increasingly been conceptualized as a developable set of emotional abilities contributing to adaptive functioning across adulthood. However, longitudinal evidence obtained in ecological organizational contexts remains limited, particularly for performance-based emotional intelligence frameworks. The present longitudinal field study investigated the effects of a large-scale emotional intelligence intervention implemented within a French public-sector institution using the QEPro performance-based framework of ability emotional intelligence. The intervention combined experiential learning, emotional decoding, and emotion regulation training over approximately 18 ..

Emotional intelligence (EI) has increasingly been conceptualized as a developable set of emotional abilities contributing to adaptive functioning across adulthood. However, longitudinal evidence obtained in ecological organizational contexts remains limited, particularly for performance-based emotional intelligence frameworks. The present longitudinal field study investigated the effects of a large-scale emotional intelligence intervention implemented within a French public-sector institution using the QEPro performance-based framework of ability emotional intelligence. The intervention combined experiential learning, emotional decoding, and emotion regulation training over approximately 18 ..

We examine whether financial performance metrics in CEO compensation contracts provide incentives for environmental performance improvement, and the conditions under which such incentives arise. Using toxic pollution as our primary outcome, we find that relative financial performance evaluation (RPE) is negatively associated with future pollution in firms whose environmental impacts are subject to greater scrutiny, whereas other financial incentives, such as equity portfolio delta and new equity grants, show no such association. This pattern is consistent with theories of corporate social responsibility and, as supported by complementary tests, with the idea that stronger environmental perfo..

Effectuation theory seeks to explain how entrepreneurs act under Knightian uncertainty through non-predictive control. However, the mechanism through which this control operates remains unclear, and the theory has been criticized for being akin to a random walk. This paper addresses this issue by integrating effectuation theory with a design science perspective on entrepreneurship. We conceptualize venture creation as the iterative design of an artifact whose structure evolves through decomposition and recomposition. Drawing on the property of near-decomposability, we propose that the artifact provides the structural continuity linking successive entrepre-neurial actions while enabling local..

The rise of AI-driven technologies, particularly generative AI (GenAI) like ChatGPT, is transforming customer service in hospitality and tourism sectors. These systems enhance user experiences by offering real-time, personalized support and 24/7 assistance. Yet, as sustainability becomes a key factor in travel decisions, consumers increasingly face information overload due to the abundance of eco-friendly options. This study examines how GenAI can alleviate this cognitive strain in sustainability-focused tourism contexts. Across two experiments (i.e., one on trip planning and another on on-site shopping), the findings show that more advanced GenAI tools significantly reduce information overl..

The rise of AI-driven technologies, particularly generative AI (GenAI) like ChatGPT, is transforming customer service in hospitality and tourism sectors. These systems enhance user experiences by offering real-time, personalized support and 24/7 assistance. Yet, as sustainability becomes a key factor in travel decisions, consumers increasingly face information overload due to the abundance of eco-friendly options. This study examines how GenAI can alleviate this cognitive strain in sustainability-focused tourism contexts. Across two experiments (i.e., one on trip planning and another on on-site shopping), the findings show that more advanced GenAI tools significantly reduce information overl..

Food insecurity (FI) has become a major focus of academic and policy concern. FI is prevalent even in highincome countries, and is consistently associated with poor physical and mental health outcomes. These associations are attenuated but not eliminated by controlling for more general social determinants. Though it is clear that the associations exist, it is less clear why. FI reflects social and material disadvantage, so its negative association with health is not a surprise; but there are multiple pathways by which the association could play out. We review four: (A) FI is a non-causal correlate of general disadvantage; (B) FI causes poor health, but this is not mediated by diet; (C) FI ca..

Background Clinician-researchers play a key role in bridging clinical care and research, yet their day-to-day activities remain poorly described. This study aimed to characterise the range of activities undertaken by clinician-researchers in a perioperative clinical trial and explore how these activities are experienced by patient-participants. Methods We conducted an ethnographic qualitative case study embedded in an RCT in a tertiary hospital. In phase 1, clinician-researchers (physicians and nurses) were observed in situ over 10 days using shadowing and time-motion analysis to document their activities. In phase 2, we conducted interviews with patient-participants. Data were analysed usin..

This paper explores the relationships between overall diet quality and attitudes toward risk and time using a general population survey. We combine a food frequency questionnaire and a choice-based preference module to elicit individual risk and time preferences. The online questionnaire was administered to a socioeconomic panel representative of the French population. We show that risk and time preferences are associated with individual heterogeneity in key aspects of diet quality, a result that holds across a wide range of robustness checks. Using a hierarchical Bayes framework, we jointly estimate individual risk aversion and impatience parameters and show that associations hold for both ..

Motivated by predicting intraday trading volume curves, we consider two spatio-temporal autoregressive models for matrix time series, in which each column may represent daily trading volume curve of one asset, and each row captures synchronized 5-minute volume intervals across multiple assets. While traditional matrix time series focus mainly on temporal evolution, our approach incorporates both spatial and temporal dynamics, enabling simultaneous analysis of interactions across multiple dimensions. The inherent endogeneity in spatio-temporal autoregressive models renders ordinary least squares estimation inconsistent. To overcome this difficulty while simultaneously estimating two distinct ..

Community-based lifestyle interventions combining physical exercise with volunteering are promoted as low-cost, scalable support for those with mental health problems, and feature prominently in social prescribing. Yet robust evidence that they are effective at scale, outside controlled trials, remains scarce. We evaluate a nationwide UK intervention that combines exercise and volunteering in local communities. Using three waves of incentivised surveys (February 2023 to March 2024; 3590 observations from 2856 respondents) linked to administrative data on participation, we compare participants with those who signed up but did not participate, including for plausibly exogenous reasons. Partici..

This paper examines differences and similarities betweenfour prominent concepts in the literature on social justice:equality of opportunity, social mobility, Sen’s capabilities, and meritocracy. We review the canonical economic modelof equality of opportunity and discuss how the dominantapproach to measuring inequality of opportunity (IOp)relates to the measurement of intergenerational mobility, and that both concepts can be considered versions of acommon framework, namely that of inherited inequality.Eliminating systematic disparities among groups of peoplewith different inherited characteristics is closely related toensuring that opportunities are equalised between them:people may still ..

Using large-scale high-granularity data from a food delivery platform and granular pollution and weather information, we study how PM2.5 fluctuations affect riders’ absenteeism, productivity, and accidents. Exploiting exogenous pollution variation from inverse boundary layer height, we find that higher pollution increases absenteeism for all workers and raises delivery times and accident rates only among (e-)bike riders, who must exert physical effort while working. Affected workers compensate productivity losses by working longer hours. Monetary incentives mitigate the effects on absenteeism but do not offset the decline in productivity and appear to exacerbate accident risk.

Using large-scale high-granularity data from a food delivery platform and granular pollution and weather information, we study how PM2.5 fluctuations affect riders’ absenteeism, productivity, and accidents. Exploiting exogenous pollution variation from inverse boundary layer height, we find that higher pollution increases absenteeism for all workers and raises delivery times and accident rates only among (e-)bike riders, who must exert physical effort while working. Affected workers compensate productivity losses by working longer hours. Monetary incentives mitigate the effects on absenteeism but do not offset the decline in productivity and appear to exacerbate accident risk.

Envy is commonly labeled a negative emotion, yet research distinguishes between benign envy, which motivates self-improvement, and malicious envy, which motivates hostility and derogation. Although both forms are unpleasant, they differ in their motivational consequences. Emotional intelligence (EI) has been linked to adaptive emotional functioning, but little is known about whether ability-based emotion regulation predicts the motivational orientation of envy. In a community sample of French adults (N = 442), we examined whether performance-based emotion regulation ability, assessed within the QEg (Generalized QEPro Ability Measure of Emotional Intelligence) model, predicted benign and mali..

Traditional calibration methods in hydrological models result in parameter values that can compensate for aleatory uncertainties in model forcings (such as rainfall, temperature, evapotranspiration, or pesticide application dates). Ignoring aleatory uncertainty can lead to subsequent model simulations being less reliable for taking operational decisions or predicting hazardous events (e.g., peaks of water pollution or floods). Robust calibration can better handle these uncertainties, but usually requires extensive model simulations, making it impractical for physically based environmental models. To overcome these issues, we use a new metamodeling approach using stochastic emulation. This me..

The carbon offset market is a voluntary market where firms trade carbon offsets to compensate for their emissions and comply with cap-and-trade regulations. In contrast to the emission trading market, which involves government-allocated emission quotas, the carbon offset market trades offsets generated from certified emission reduction projects by independent suppliers. While both markets operate concurrently, they are governed by distinct pricing mechanisms and regulatory structures. We develop a game-theoretic model that incorporates the supply side of the offset market, often neglected in previous literature, and analyze how offsets influence firm behavior and emissions trading dynamics. ..

I study the optimal taxation of artificial intelligence (AI). My analysis highlights a wage-compression effect that provides a rationale for subsidizing AI, as AI adoption may reduce rather than increase wage inequality. When this effect outweighs AI's social costs, AI should be subsidized instead of taxed. I treat AI as a productive input distinct from robots, as the two technologies perform different ranges of tasks. Using numerical simulations, I demonstrate that the optimal policy for AI may differ sharply from that for robots. Under the benchmark calibration, AI is subsidized, whereas robots are taxed. Therefore, the case for taxing AI is weaker than is commonly assumed. When AI lowers ..