I am an Assistant Professor of Economics and Strategy at the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego. I received my PhD in Economics from UC Berkeley and completed my postdoctoral training at the Haas School of Business.
My research covers topics in applied microeconomics, with a focus on questions relating to health and household finance. As a behavioral economist, I incorporate insights from psychology into economic models to better understand individual behavior. I am especially interested in applications that relate to performance at work, with insights for firms and individuals on how to effectively boost productivity.
Working Papers
Simple Actions, Complex Habits: Lessons from Hospital Hand Hygiene
Abstract: Routine tasks are often critical to performance but not consistently done. In the case of hospital hand hygiene, vital for infection prevention, guidelines are followed only half the time. Using data on whether 13,606 healthcare workers wash their hands 123M times that they are expected to, I document substantial heterogeneity consistent with a model of automatic cue-based habits. High performers fatigue 43% less than low performers but respond similarly when routines are disrupted. Behavior is also location-specific; healthcare workers wash more in rooms they have visited more in the past. These features of habit have implications for motivating routine behaviors.
Goals, Expectations, and Performance
with Avner Strulov-Shlain
Abstract: People and organizations often set goals to self-motivate and achieve better outcomes in challenging tasks. But goals, and their effectiveness, might depend on what people expect to happen. Do goals reflect expectations or do goals set expectations? How do goals and expectations affect performance? These distinctions are important for motivation and intervention design. We run an online real-effort task to answer these two questions by introducing exogenous variation in goals and expectations. First, we find that goals mostly reflect existing expectations rather than set expectations. Second, practicing an easier version of a task leads to higher expectations and higher performance. Eliciting a goal leads to higher performance as well. However, controlling for expectations, changing the difficulty of the goal has no discernible effect. These results suggest that people benefit from being optimistic and setting a goal, but they cannot fool themselves into expecting and doing more simply by choosing a higher goal.
Integrating Neuro-Psychological Habit Research into Consumer Choice Models
with Ryan Webb, Jessica Fong, Asaf Mazar, Julia Levine, Olivia Natan, Clarice Zhao, Phillippa Lally, Sanne de Wit, John O’Doherty, Andrew Ching, Raphael Thomadsen, Matthew Osborne, Peter Landry, Mark Bouton, Wendy Wood, and Colin Camerer
Abstract: We discuss how habit is defined across disciplines that study human choices. In particular, we examine the role of learning in forming habits, the roles of automaticity, context and cues, and attention, and whether habits reflect a change in preferences or a choice system which is partly decoupled from preferences. These constructs are used to create a framework for economics, psychology, and marketing research, suitable for analysis of consumer choice experiments and datasets.
Publications
Rent or Buy? Inflation Experiences and Homeownership within and across Countries [Published Version]
with Ulrike Malmendier
Journal of Finance, June 2024, vol. 79 (3), pp. 1977-2023.
Abstract: We show that past inflation experiences strongly predict homeownership within and across countries. First, we collect novel survey data, which reveals inflation protection to be a key motivation for homeownership, especially after personal experiences of high inflation. Second, using household data from 22 European countries, we find that higher personal exposure to historical inflation predicts higher homeownership rates. We estimate similar associations among immigrants to the US who experienced different past inflation in their home countries but face the same US housing market. As predicted by the experience-effects model, the relationship is strongest in countries with predominantly fixed-rate mortgages.
with Daniel Benjamin, David Laibson, Walter Mischel, Philip Peake, Yuichi Shoda, and Nicole Wilson
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, November 2020, vol. 179, pp. 743-756. Special Issue "Understanding Cognition and Decision Making by Children".
Abstract: How well do pre-school delay of gratification and life-course measures of self-regulation predict mid-life capital formation? We surveyed 113 participants of the 1967–1973 Bing pre-school studies on delay of gratification when they were in their late 40’s. They reported 11 mid-life capital formation outcomes, including net worth, permanent income, absence of high-interest debt, forward-looking behaviors, and educational attainment. To address multiple hypothesis testing and our small sample, we pre-registered an analysis plan of well–powered tests. As predicted, a newly constructed and pre-registered measure derived from preschool delay of gratification does not predict the 11 capital formation variables (i.e., the sign-adjusted average correlation was 0.02). A pre-registered composite self-regulation index, combining preschool delay of gratification with survey measures of self-regulation collected at ages 17, 27, and 37, does predict 10 of the 11 capital formation variables in the expected direction, with an average correlation of 0.19. The inclusion of the preschool delay of gratification measure in this composite index does not affect the index’s predictive power. We tested several hypothesized reasons that preschool delay of gratification does not have predictive power for our mid-life capital formation variables.