Andrew Healy

Myopic Voters and Natural Disaster Policy

Do voters effectively hold elected officials accountable for policy decisions? Using data on natural disasters, government spending, and election returns, we show that voters reward the incumbent presidential party for delivering disaster relief spending, but not for investing in disaster preparedness spending. These inconsistencies distort the incentives of public officials, leading the government to underinvest in disaster preparedness, thereby causing substantial public welfare losses. We estimate that

Can Teams Help to Close the Gender Competition Gap

1 spent on preparedness is worth about

Random Events, Economic Losses, and Retrospective Voting: Implications for Democratic Competence

15 in terms of the future damage it mitigates. By estimating both the determinants of policy decisions and the consequences of those policies, we provide more complete evidence about citizen competence and government accountability.

Childhood Socialization and Political Attitudes: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

We investigate the effect that competing in teams has on gender differences in choosing to enter competitions. In our experiment, subjects chose whether to compete based on the combined performance of themselves and a teammate. We find that competing in two‐person teams reduces the gender competition gap by two‐thirds. Independent of the sex of one’s partner, female subjects prefer to compete in teams whereas male subjects prefer to compete as individuals. We find that this result is driven primarily by gender differences in competitive preferences, as opposed to other potential explanations such as risk aversion, feedback aversion or confidence.

Digging into the Pocketbook: Evidence on Economic Voting from Income Registry Data Matched to a Voter Survey

We leverage the natural experiment afforded by tornado incidence to estimate the effect of exogenous economic loss on electoral outcomes. We find that voters punish the incumbent party in presidential elections for economic damage resulting from tornadoes. Although this behavior could suggest that retrospective voting in this domain reflects voters irrationally blaming incumbent politicians for circumstances beyond their control, we instead find evidence suggesting that voting behavior reflects democratic competence. First, voters do not punish the incumbent party for tornado-caused deaths, which governments likely do not have the power to address with effective policy. Second, the incumbent party only appears to lose votes when no disaster declaration takes place in response to the tornado. Thus, voters appear to be rewarding and punishing government with respect to its performance in handling the disaster, as opposed to blaming the government for these natural events.

Presidential Voting and the Local Economy: Evidence from Two Population-Based Data Sets

Scholars have argued that childhood experiences strongly impact political attitudes, but we actually have little causal evidence since external factors that could influence preferences are correlated with the household environment. We utilize a younger sibling’s gender to isolate random variation in the childhood environment and thereby provide unique evidence of political socialization. Having sisters causes young men to be more likely to express conservative viewpoints with regards to gender roles and to identify as Republicans. We demonstrate these results in two panel surveys conducted decades apart: the Political Socialization Panel (PSP) and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). We also use data collected during childhood to uncover evidence for a potential underlying mechanism: families with more female children are more likely to reinforce traditional gender roles. The results demonstrate that previously understudied childhood experiences can have important causal effects on political attitude formation

Determining false-positives requires considering the totality of evidence.

To paint a fuller picture of economic voters, we combine personal income records with a representative election survey. We examine three central topics in the economic voting literature: pocketbook versus sociotropic voting, the effects of partisanship on economic evaluations, and voter myopia. First, we show that voters who appear in survey data to be voting based on the national economy are, in fact, voting equally on the basis of their personal financial conditions. Second, there is strong evidence of both partisan bias and economic information in economic evaluations, but personal economic data is required to separate the two. Third, although in experiments and aggregate historical data recent economic conditions appear to drive vote choice, we find no evidence of myopia when we examine actual personal economic data.

Do Firms Have Short Memories? Evidence From Major League Baseball

We show that standard economic measures based on samples and richer newly available ones based on populations lead to different conclusions about democratic accountability. Previous research, which has primarily relied on sample-based measures, has mostly missed an important determinant of presidential election outcomes: the local economy. We detect the local economy’s impact with two unique data sets, one of which includes data on all consumer loans made in California and the other a census of businesses. In contrast to measures subject to sampling error, these population-based measures indicate that economic conditions at the ZIP code and county level have an impact on presidential election outcomes. Presidents therefore face incentives to focus on electorally important geographic regions.

Cost asymmetry and incomplete information in a volunteer’s dilemma experiment

Fowler and Montagnes (1) independently replicate one finding in Healy et al. (2): that college football wins increase incumbent vote share. Although we interpret this result as evidence of irrelevant events impacting voters’ decisions, which is consistent with established theory in the psychological and decision sciences literatures, Fowler and Montagnes (1) conclude that chance is responsible. False-positives can occur. Consequently, we performed several tests to address that possibility (2), but Fowler and Montagnes (1) surprisingly ignore these analyses. Although replication and reanalysis are important to scientific discovery, one cannot selectively consider pieces of evidence when evaluating past research. Our consideration of the totality of evidence [the full results in Healy et al. (2) and the new results in Fowler and Montagnes (1)] leads us to conclude that college football games influence elections.

Economic Development, Mobility, and Political Discontent: An Experimental Test of Tocqueville’s Thesis in Pakistan

When deciding what salary to offer an employee, a firm needs to predict that employees future productivity. One piece of information that a firm can use to predict productivity is the employees past performance record. Classical theory predicts that firms will effectively use the available information to choose an appropriate salary offer. Evidence from baseball contracts indicates, however, that memory-based biases influence salary offers. Consistent with insights from psychology and behavioral economics, salaries are affected too much by recent performance compared with past performance. All organizations do not suffer equally from short memories. The teams that achieve the most with the money that they spend also use past performance data most effectively.