New Research Group Members

Delighted to welcome four new members of the research team. We will shortly advertise some more posts.

Welcome to Till Weber who joins us, having just submitted his PhD at Nottingham. Till will work with us for at least the next two years, including lecturing on the new MSc. His webpage is below and he will present an overview of his experimental research at a later session.  https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/economics/people/till.weber

Welcome also to Leonhard Lades who joins EnvEcon and Geary for two years from the University of Stirling. Leo will also give some lectures on the MSc. He has published a number of papers on intertemporal choice, consumption, ethical aspects of nudging, and a variety of other topics. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=3SQTAFQAAAAJ&hl=en

While he has been here a while on another project, I am also glad to formally welcome Michael Daly, also from Stirling, who starts his 2 year Marie Skłodowska Curie fellowship here in the next couple of weeks. Michael is Associate Professor at Stirling and has published extensively in economic psychology, health psychology, behavioural change and cognate areas. https://www.michaeldalyresearch.com/

Tadgh Hegarty has also started with us, and will conduct a PhD at the intersection of behavioural economics and machine learning, examining the nature and extent of behavioural biases in gambling decisions.

Wednesday Weekly Sessions

We host a weekly session from 930am to 1030am on Wednesday mornings to bring our researchers and students together with external stakeholders interested in this area. As well as knowledge exchange, we also hope that students will be encouraged to apply some of their material to direct policy questions. Below is current schedule. We welcome expressions of interest.

27th September: Simon Rafferty (EPA) "Behavioural Economics and Environmental Policy" and Patricia Harris (HSA): "Reducing Work Accidents in Ireland"

4th October: Clare Delargy (BIT): "Behavioural Insights Team and Public Policy".

11th October: Aine Lyng and Ronan Murphy (NCCP): "Cancer Prevention"

18th October: Cathal Fitzgerald (DETI): "Brexit and Firm Decision Making; Behavioural Economics of Innovation".

25th October: Till Weber (Nottingham): "Experimental Methods and Behavioural Economics".

1st November: Leonhard Lades (UCD and EnvEcon): "Naturalistic Monitoring of Human Preferences and Behaviour".

8th November: Michael Daly (UCD and Stirling): "Self-control and Health".

15 November: Orla Doyle (UCD): "Behavioural Economics and Early Childhood Intervention".

22nd November:

Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship 2018

The deadline for these scholarships is November 1st. We are certainly open to speaking to MSc students interested in applying for PhD funding to conduct research in our research group. Full details are available here They are open to EU nationals living outside of Ireland and other resident categories set out in their terms and conditions to apply to take their PhD in an Irish university. 

Glenn W. Harrison Friday 13th October 1230pm to 2pm

Professor Glenn Harrison comes to Dublin on October 13th and will give a public lecture on Behavioral Welfare Economics. Professor Harrison is one of the leading researchers in econometrics and experimental economics. I can also say from experience that he is an engaging speaker with a wide range of intellectual interests. He has agreed to give a talk that will be accessible to a broad audience interested in behavioural economics. His bio is below and website is here. The talk will take place from 1230pm to 2pm at the Institute of Banking Building near the IFSC. There is no charge for registering but we ask people to register in advance on this link as space is limited and the building is secured. 

Glenn Harrison is the C.V. Starr Chair of Risk Management & Insurance and director of the Center for the Economic Analysis of Risk (CEAR) in the Department of Risk Management & Insurance, J. Mack Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University. He has more than 185 academic publications, including general journals such as Econometrica, American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Economic Journal, Journal of the American Statistical Association, and American Journal of Public Health, and specialist journals such as Journal of Environmental Economics & Management, Land Economics, Natural Resources Journal, Journal of Law & Economics, Experimental Economics, and Economics & Philosophy. His research interests include experimental economics, law and economics, international trade policy and environmental policy. 

His work in experimental economics has included the study of bidding behavior in auctions, market contestability and regulation, bargaining behavior, and the elicitation of risk and time preferences. Most recently it has examined the complementarity of laboratory and field experiments. His work in law and economics has centered on the calculation of compensatory damages in tobacco litigation, including testifying for plaintiffs in the Medicaid litigation that resulted in a settlement worth more than $200 billion. Most recently he has worked on the relationship between compensatory and punitive damages, and class actions involving the excessive promotion of certain drugs. His work in international trade policy has employed computable general equilibrium models to quantify the effects of unilateral, regional and multilateral trade reforms. A particular focus of this policy analysis has been to assess the effects of trade reform on poor households in developing countries. His work in environ mental economics has included modeling the effects of alternative policies to mitigate global warming, critiques of casual applications of the contingent valuation method, and improved methods of damage assessment. Most recently he has focused on the formal characterization of environmental reform as a “policy lottery” that properly reflects uncertainty in predicted effects on households. 

Professor Harrison has been a consultant for numerous government agencies and private bodies. These include the World Bank (evaluating trade policy reforms for developing countries), the Swedish government and the United States Environmental Protection Agency (evaluating carbon tax proposals), the Danish government (evaluating tax and deregulation policies), and counsel representing parties suing tobacco companies and drug companies for economic damages. Professor Harrison is a Pisces, and loves red wine, one Swedish woman, and one American daughter. Before academic life, Professor Harrison played Australian “no-rules” football for Hawthorn in the Australian Football League, kicking one goal in his career.

Irish Postgraduate and Early Career Conference 2018

From 2001 to 2013, we held eleven workshops in Ireland for postgraduate and early career researchers. They started as exclusively aimed at Irish-based researchers and eventually morphed into international events. The events were run mostly by PhD students in the Universities, including events hosted by UCD, TCD, Limerick, Cork, and Galway. In Scotland, 8 universities combine on PhD training and host an annual event for PhD students. Such events provide students and researchers an opportunity to discuss their work outside their own institution and meet other researchers and faculty.

To restart this effort, we will host a full-day event in Dublin on January 19th. The event is aimed at PhD students and early career researchers across the Irish universities. A full call for papers with details of submissions will be released soon. The event will take the form of thematic sessions with ideally at least some faculty discussant input at each session, along with keynote talks, and engagement with policy and industry. We welcome submissions from PhD students and early career researchers in institutions on the island of Ireland.

I would welcome suggestions from students, researchers, and faculty about how to make this a feature of the Irish research environment. Some questions include whether it should be a student-run event in future years, links to the Irish Economics Association, venues, format of sessions, whether it should be restricted to national institutions, whether there should be job-market aspects etc., I hope revamping these sessions will also create an opportunity to discuss collaboration on advanced training in Economics across the country.

Workplace Well-Being Programmes

Below is the submitted text of an article I wrote for the Sunday Business Post - link to the final slightly tidier article behind a pay wall here. There have been several recent articles particularly in the US context questioning the efficacy of corporate well-being programmes (e.g. here and here with thanks to Brendan Kennelly for suggestions). RAND Europe recently produced a report looking at how various programmes were being implemented in the UK, pointing to a relatively positive view of how they are received by workers but also pointing to the dearth of any effectiveness evidence. In Ireland, the main employers group IBEC have launched a new initiative to promote well-being in the workplace - the Keepwell Mark. I spoke at their launch that also included speakers from companies such as Microsoft Ireland and was attended by hundreds of company representatives. The seeming failure of the tested initiatives in the US to convert into improvements in company productivity and the extent to which many of the initiatives in the US even seem to have backfired and in cases reduced employee morale (e.g compulsory drug testing initiatives reducing trust) should give us pause in the Irish context. Should IBEC be successful in bringing many of the country's employers on board such an initiative, it would provide the opportunity for a serious and structured way of evaluating the impact of various features of well-being initiatives and hopefully the potential to avoid rolling out ones that are going to have harmful effects to both productivity and morale, and ultimately to develop an evidence base on the extent to which well-designed initiatives could have potential benefits and the extent of these benefits. 

The declines in infant mortality in Ireland in the 1950s still represent one of the state's major achievements. Improvements in sanitation, in particular, led to healthier maternal, infant, and childhood conditions, setting the foundation both for reducing mortality and improving the health of people as they grew up. At least some of the health improvements we are seeing in our aging populations can be traced to this period. Furthermore, while people have spoken about our health system as being a "black hole", the improvements in life expectancy in the last 30 years have been remarkable, fuelled in part by reductions in smoking and improved nutrition but also by health services, however still flawed, that have substantially improved with the investments made in them by successive governments. 

There is increasing evidence for the interplay between health and economic productivity. As might be expected, economists disagree on the precise relationships, but an increasing body of work has related health to economic productivity at both individual and national levels. In the context of aging populations, it seems obvious that improving health will act at least partly as a bulwark against rising dependency ratios, allowing people to work healthily longer into life. One key element of this is the extent to which mental health and chronic pain influence economic outcomes. Depression and chronic pain have dramatic effects on probabilities of unemployment, lost days at work, and life-time wealth accumulation. Mental health might well be the biggest economic concern for the Irish economy in terms of the scope and severity of the effects. Scholars such as Richard Layard have called for major and transformative levels of investments in mental health across countries to understand conditions more and develop and scale-up effective treatments. More broadly, developing workplaces and health services that break the link between mental health and economic deprivation is one of the major tasks of the 21st century.  

As well as the implications for economic productivity, there has been an increasing emphasis on how to incorporate health and well-being into policy making as a goal and indicator of progress. A range of high-level reports have asked about how to construct measures that go beyond GDP and economic measures. The incorporation of factors such as literacy, life expectancy, economic inequality and other measures of welfare provides a more rounded account of the progress of nations and has a long history. More recently, the incorporation of measures of subjective welfare and of mental health has become the focus of attention. 

The development of workplace programmes to improve health and well-being should be seen in this context, both in relation to their potential role in productivity and as contributing to well-being as an end in itself. So far, such programmes are in their relative infancy. The evidence on the links between well-being and work is very strong but that is different to saying we know how to influence those links. The internet is replete with examples of over-claims about the benefits of introducing health and well-being programmes in work settings. So far, the evidence is slight that productivity can be directly improved by such programmes. There are certainly many studies showing that employees will engage with many of them and enjoy aspects of them etc., But whether investment in worker health and well-being driven by programmatic activity of firms can be part of a major societal shift in well-being and productivity is still an open question. 

There are clearly many plausible reasons why providing access to healthier food at work, exercise facilities, health screening, and related services might impact on both well-being and productivity. But there are also pitfalls. Such facilities might only be used by people who are already doing fine in terms of health and well-being. Framed badly, corporate well-being programmes might come across as intrusive or patronising, an attempt to distract from wider issues, or even a subtle hint that worker dissatisfaction is due to their own fitness or mental health issues. Encouraging people to disclose mental health issues to their employer often ignores the fact that many companies have very little idea what to do with such a disclosure and there are risks that people could end up being tacitly discriminated against. Recent reviews of the literature make it clear that there are not simple off-the-shelf models for intervening in worker well-being that will also raise productivity. If this is to be achieved, it will require iteration and commitment to testing, and a willingness to measure and acknowledge failure.  

Even with all the above in mind, accumulating evidence on work-place programmes that genuinely have a causal impact on worker well-being and productivity would be a substantial advance for both business and policy in Ireland. Adopting a hard-headed approach to evaluating these programmes will be key.  

Liam Delaney is Professor of Economics at UCD and directs the MSc in Behavioural Economics. 

Economics, Psychology, and Policy Links 30/09/17

Our new research group launched on September 8th at an event with Professor Peter John. Our new Msc in Behavioural Economics has also started in UCD. We host a weekly meeting to bring our students and researchers together with other researchers, policymakers, and industry from outside the university and we welcome expressions of interest to attend.

1. The US Internal Revenue Service have produced a guide to using behavioural insights

2. My reading list for students in UCD this term is available here

3. Childhood self-control predicts adult pension participation. Our new paper that came out recently in Economics Letters.

4. Andrew Gelman on whether we should abandon statistical significance

5. The festival of economics and comedy that grew out of Ireland's financial crisis, Kilkenomics, takes place again this year from November 9th to November 12th. I am giving a talk on Father Ted and Economics. This is a one-off and probably not a good idea on my behalf but the overall festival is a really nice event and Kilkenny one of the best places in Ireland to visit.

6. My colleague Orla Doyle and colleagues have released a working paper on terrorism and well-being.

7. Irish Department of Finance & Govt Evaluation Service paper on implications of behavioural economics for tax policy

8. Second issue of the Journal of Behavioural Economics for Policy now available online.

9.  Richard Layard on economics & mental health

10. Details of events and mailing list for the Irish Behavioural Science and Policy Network.