Joseph Price

Parent-Child Quality Time: Does Birth Order Matter?

Using data from the American Time Use Survey, I find that a first-born child receives 20-30 more minutes of quality time each day with his or her parent than a second-born child of the same age from a similar family. The birth-order difference results from parents giving roughly equal time to each child at any point in time while the amount of parent-child quality time decreases as children get older. These results provide a plausible explanation for recent research showing a very significant effect of birth order on child outcomes.

Using Incentives to Encourage Healthy Eating in Children

There is growing interest in the situations in which incentives have a significant effect on positive behaviors, particularly in children. Using a randomized field experiment, we find that incentives increase the fraction of children eating a serving of fruits or vegetables during lunch by 80 percent and reduce the amount of waste by 33 percent. At schools with a larger fraction of low-income children, the increase in the fraction of children who eat a serving of fruits or vegetables is even larger, indicating that incentives successfully target the children who are likely to benefit the most from the increased consumption.

Default options, incentives and food choices: evidence from elementary-school children.

OBJECTIVE To examine whether requiring children to place fruits and vegetables on their lunch trays increases consumption of these items. DESIGN Observational study that exploited naturally occurring variation between two school districts and a pre–post observational study at schools that changed their lunch policy mid-year. SETTING Fifteen elementary schools from two school districts, one requiring students to place a fruit or vegetable on their tray and one that does not. In addition, three schools that implemented a default option part way through the school year. SUBJECTS Students at eighteen elementary schools (41 374 child-day observations) across the two experiments. RESULTS Requiring that fruits and vegetables be placed on each childs tray increased the fraction of children who ate a serving of fruits or vegetables by 8 percentage points (P < 0·01) but led to an extra 0·7 servings being thrown away per lunch served (P < 0·01). The default option approach cost

Inside the Black Box of Doctoral Education: What Program Characteristics Influence Doctoral Students' Attrition and Graduation Probabilities?

US 1·72 to get one additional child to eat one serving of fruits and vegetables for 1 d. However, when default options were combined with a small rewards programme the efficacy of both interventions increased. CONCLUSIONS A default option, as a stand-alone programme, had only a limited impact on fruit and vegetable consumption but was much less cost-effective than other approaches. Schools requiring children to take fruits and vegetables with their lunch might consider adopting additional interventions to ensure that the additional items served do not end up being thrown away.

How Much More XXX is Generation X Consuming? Evidence of Changing Attitudes and Behaviors Related to Pornography Since 1973

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Graduate Education Initiative (GEI) provided funding to 54 departments in the humanities and related social sciences during the 1990s to improve their PhD programs. This article estimates the aspects of PhD programs the GEI influenced and how these aspects influenced attrition and graduation probabilities. It uses survey data on entrants to PhD programs at 44 of the “treatment” departments and 41 “control” departments during a 15-year period that spanned the start of the GEI. Factor analysis is used to group more than 100 program characteristics into a smaller number of factors, and the impact of the GEI on each and the impact of each on attrition and graduation probabilities are estimated. The article estimates the routes via which the GEI influenced attrition and graduation rates and indicates which aspects of PhD programs departments should concentrate on to improve their programs’ performance.

Subperfect Game: Profitable Biases of NBA Referees

We use data from the General Social Survey (GSS) over a 40-year period (1973–2012) to evaluate changes in attitudes about pornography and pornography consumption among American young adults. One of the major challenges in making comparisons across birth generations is separating the effect of birth cohort from age and period effects. We use an intrinsic estimator to separately identify the effects of age, birth cohort, and time period using 40 years of repeated cross-section data. We find that, relative to the general population, young peoples beliefs about whether pornography should be illegal have stayed relatively constant over this 40-year period and, if anything, have slightly increased. We also find that pornography consumption has been increasing across birth generations, though this increase has been smaller than would be inferred based on differences across generations at a single point in time, due to a strong age component in consumption patterns.

Gender Differences in the Response to Competition

This paper empirically investigates three hypotheses regarding biases of National Basketball Association referees. Identification of basketball referee bias is typically difficult as changes in observed statistics may be caused by either changes in referee bias or player behavior. We identify bias by exploiting the fact that referees have varying degrees of discretion over different types of a particular statistic-turnovers. This allows us to conduct a treatment and control-style analysis, using the less discretionary turnovers as the player behavior control. The results provide evidence that referees favor home teams, teams losing during games, and teams losing in playoff series. All three biases are likely to increase consumer demand.

Patient education and the impact of new medical research

To investigate whether men and women respond differently to competition and whether this response depends on the gender mix of the group, the author examines outcomes of the Mellon Foundations Graduate Education Initiative, a competitive fellowship program instituted in 1991 that was aimed at increasing graduation rates and decreasing time to degree. Mens performance, as measured by time to candidacy, increased 10% in response to the program, with the largest gains for men in departments with the highest proportions of female students. Women did not increase performance, on average, but the response of women did differ greatly depending on the gender mix of their peers, with a more positive response when a larger fraction of the group was female. These results suggest that when devising incentive schemes, policy-makers may need to be mindful of an inherent tradeoff between increasing aggregate outcomes through the use of competition and achieving gender equity.

Habit formation in children: Evidence from incentives for healthy eating

We examine the impact that medical research published in peer-reviewed journals has on the practice of medicine. We exploit the release of a recent New England Journal of Medicine article which demonstrated that the risks of attempting a vaginal birth after having a previous C-section birth (VBAC) were higher than previously thought. We find that immediately following this article, the national VBAC rate dropped by 16% and this change was largest among more educated mothers, particularly those with a graduate degree.

Documenting Pornography Use in America: A Comparative Analysis of Methodological Approaches

We present findings from a field experiment conducted at 40 elementary schools involving 8000 children and 400,000 child-day observations, which tested whether providing short-run incentives can create habit formation in children. Over a 3- or 5-week period, students received an incentive for eating a serving of fruits or vegetables during lunch. Relative to an average baseline rate of 39%, providing small incentives doubled the fraction of children eating at least one serving of fruits or vegetables. Two months after the end of the intervention, the consumption rate at schools remained 21% above baseline for the 3-week treatment and 44% above baseline for the 5-week treatment. These findings indicate that short-run incentives can produce changes in behavior that persist after incentives are removed.