Paper by Rebecca Janßen, Reinhold Kesler, Michael E. Kummer & Joel Waldfogel: “Using data on 4.1 million apps at the Google Play Store from 2016 to 2019, we document that GDPR induced the exit of about a third of available apps; and in the quarters following implementation, entry of new apps fell by half. We estimate a structural model of demand and entry in the app market. Comparing long-run equilibria with and without GDPR, we find that GDPR reduces consumer surplus and aggregate app usage by about a third. Whatever the privacy benefits of GDPR, they come at substantial costs in foregone innovation…(More)”.
More than just information: what does the public want to know about climate change?
Paper by Michael Murunga et all: “Public engagement on climate change is a vital concern for both science and society. Despite more people engaging with climate change science today, there remains a high-level contestation in the public sphere regarding scientific credibility and identifying information needs, interests, and concerns of the non-technical public. In this paper, we present our response to these challenges by describing the use of a novel “public-powered” approach to engaging the public through submitting questions of interest about climate change to climate researchers before a planned engagement activity. Employing thematic content analysis on the submitted questions, we describe how those people we engaged with are curious about understanding climate change science, including mitigating related risks and threats by adopting specific actions. We assert that by inviting the public to submit their questions of interest to researchers before an engagement activity, this step can inform why and transform how actors engage in reflexive dialogue…(More)”.
(When) Do Open Budgets Transform Lives? Progress and Next Steps in Fiscal Openness Research
Paper by Xiao Hui Tai, Shikhar Mehra & Joshua E. Blumenstock: “This paper documents the rapidly growing empirical literature that can plausibly claim to identify causal effects of transparency or participation in budgeting in a variety of contexts. Recent studies convincingly demonstrate that the power of audits travels well beyond the context of initial field-defining studies, consider participatory budgeting beyond Brazil, where such practices were pioneered, and examine previously neglected outcomes, notably revenues and procurement. Overall, the study of the impacts of fiscal openness has become richer and more nuanced. The most well-documented causal effects are positive: lower corruption and enhanced accountability at the ballot box. Moreover, these impacts have been shown to apply across different settings. This research concludes that the empirical case for open government in this policy area is rapidly growing in strength. This paper sets out challenges related to studying national-level reforms; working directly with governments; evaluating systems as opposed to programs; clarifying the relationship between transparency and participation; and understanding trade-offs for reforms in this area….(More)”.
Can behavioral interventions be too salient? Evidence from traffic safety messages
Article by Jonathan D. Hall and Joshua M. Madsen: “Policy-makers are increasingly turning to behavioral interventions such as nudges and informational campaigns to address a variety of issues. Guidebooks say that these interventions should “seize people’s attention” at a time when they can take the desired action, but little consideration has been given to the costs of seizing one’s attention and to the possibility that these interventions may crowd out other, more important, considerations. We estimated these costs in the context of a widespread, seemingly innocuous behavioral campaign with the stated objective of reducing traffic crashes. This campaign displays the year-to-date number of statewide roadside fatalities (fatality messages) on previously installed highway dynamic message signs (DMSs) and has been implemented in 28 US states.
We estimated the impact of displaying fatality messages using data from Texas. Texas provides an ideal setting because the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) decided to show fatality messages starting in August 2012 for 1 week each month: the week before TxDOT’s monthly board meeting (campaign weeks). This allows us to measure the impact of the intervention, holding fixed the road segment, year, month, day of week, and time of day. We used data on 880 DMSs and all crashes occurring in Texas between 1 January 2010 and 31 December 2017 to investigate the effects of this safety campaign. We estimated how the intervention affects crashes near DMSs as well as statewide. As placebo tests, we estimated whether the chosen weeks inherently differ using data from before TxDOT started displaying fatality messages and data from upstream of DMSs.
Contrary to policy-makers’ expectations, we found that displaying fatality messages increases the number of traffic crashes. Campaign weeks realize a 1.52% increase in crashes within 5 km of DMSs, slightly diminishing to a 1.35% increase over the 10 km after DMSs. We used instrumental variables to recover the effect of displaying a fatality message and document a significant 4.5% increase in the number of crashes over 10 km. The effect of displaying fatality messages is comparable to raising the speed limit by 3 to 5 miles per hour or reducing the number of highway troopers by 6 to 14%. We also found that the total number of statewide on-highway crashes is higher during campaign weeks. The social costs of these fatality messages are large: Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that this campaign causes an additional 2600 crashes and 16 fatalities per year in Texas alone, with a social cost of $377 million per year…(More)”.
A Computational Inflection for Scientific Discovery
Paper by Tom Hope, Doug Downey, Oren Etzioni, Daniel S. Weld, and Eric Horvitz: “We stand at the foot of a significant inflection in the trajectory of scientific discovery. As society continues on its fast-paced digital transformation, so does humankind’s collective scientific knowledge and discourse. We now read and write papers in digitized form, and a great deal of the formal and informal processes of science are captured digitally — including papers, preprints and books, code and datasets, conference presentations, and interactions in social networks and communication platforms. The transition has led to the growth of a tremendous amount of information, opening exciting opportunities for computational models and systems that analyze and harness it. In parallel, exponential growth in data processing power has fueled remarkable advances in AI, including self-supervised neural models capable of learning powerful representations from large-scale unstructured text without costly human supervision. The confluence of societal and computational trends suggests that computer science is poised to ignite a revolution in the scientific process itself.
However, the explosion of scientific data, results and publications stands in stark contrast to the constancy of human cognitive capacity. While scientific knowledge is expanding with rapidity, our minds have remained static, with severe limitations on the capacity for finding, assimilating and manipulating information. We propose a research agenda of task-guided knowledge retrieval, in which systems counter humans’ bounded capacity by ingesting corpora of scientific knowledge and retrieving inspirations, explanations, solutions and evidence synthesized to directly augment human performance on salient tasks in scientific endeavors. We present initial progress on methods and prototypes, and lay out important opportunities and challenges ahead with computational approaches that have the potential to revolutionize science…(More)”.
Using mobile money data and call detail records to explore the risks of urban migration in Tanzania
Paper by Rosa Lavelle-Hill: “Understanding what factors predict whether an urban migrant will end up in a deprived neighbourhood or not could help prevent the exploitation of vulnerable individuals. This study leveraged pseudonymized mobile money interactions combined with cell phone data to shed light on urban migration patterns and deprivation in Tanzania. Call detail records were used to identify individuals who migrated to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s largest city. A street survey of the city’s subwards was used to determine which individuals moved to more deprived areas. t-tests showed that people who settled in poorer neighbourhoods had less money coming into their mobile money account after they moved, but not before. A machine learning approach was then utilized to predict which migrants will move to poorer areas of the city, making them arguably more vulnerable to poverty, unemployment and exploitation. Features indicating the strength and location of people’s social connections in Dar es Salaam before they moved (‘pull factors’) were found to be most predictive, more so than traditional ‘push factors’ such as proxies for poverty in the migrant’s source region…(More)”.
Data and Market Power
Paper by Jan Eeckhout & Laura Veldkamp: “Might firms’ use of data create market power? To explore this hypothesis, we craft a model in which economies of scale in data induce a data-rich firm to invest in producing at a lower marginal cost and larger scale. However, the model uncovers much richer interactions between data, welfare and market power. Data affects risk, firm size and the composition of the goods firms produce, all of which affect markups. The tradeoff between these forces depends on the level of aggregation at which markups are measured. Empirical researchers who measure markups at the product level, firm level or industry level come to different conclusions about trends and cyclical fluctuations in markups. Our results reconcile and re-interpret these facts. The divergence between product, firm and industry markups can be a sign that firms are using data to reallocate production to the goods consumers want most….(More)”.
Understanding Public Participation as a Mechanism Affecting Government Fiscal Outcomes: Theory and Evidence from Participatory Budgeting
Paper by Jinsol Park, J S Butler, and Nicolai Petrovsky: “This study aims to advance our knowledge about the role of public participation in formulating budgetary decisions of local governments. By focusing on participatory budgeting as a prominent form of public participation in the budgetary process, we posit that participatory budgeting serves two important roles in aligning the fiscal outcomes of local governments with citizen preferences: (1) increased transparency of the local budget and (2) improved budget literacy of citizens. This study investigates a link between participatory budgeting and the fiscal outcomes of local governments by utilizing data drawn from Korean local governments for seven fiscal years. Employing instrumental variable regression to address endogeneity, there is strong evidence that public participation and deliberation during the participatory budgeting process have a positive association with the fiscal balance. There is also weak evidence that the authority delegated to participatory budgeting participants affects the fiscal balance. The findings of this study imply that it is the quality of public participation that matters in holding the government accountable for its fiscal decisions…(More)”.
Trust but Verify: Validating New Measures for Mapping Social Infrastructure in Cities
Paper by Timothy Fraser et al: “Scholars and policymakers increasingly recognize the value of social capital – the connections that generate and enable trust among people – in responding to and recovering from shocks and disasters. However, some communities have more social infrastructure, that is, sites that produce and maintain social capital, than others. Community centers, libraries, public pools, and parks serve as locations where people can gather, interact, and build social ties. Much research on urban spaces relies on Google maps because of its ubiquity and this article tests the degree to which it can accurately, reliably, and effectively capture social infrastructure. In this study, we map the social infrastructure of Boston using Google Maps Places API and then ground truth our measures, mapping social infrastructure on street corners with in-person site observations to evaluate the accuracy of available data. We find that though we may need to use multi-vectored measurement when trying to capture social infrastructure, Google maps serve as reliable measurements with a predictable, acceptable margin of error…(More)”.
The Accountable Bureaucrat
Paper by Anya Bernstein and Cristina Rodriguez: “Common wisdom has it that, without close supervision by an elected official, administrative agencies are left unaccountable to the people they regulate. For both proponents and detractors of the administrative state, agency accountability thus hangs on the concentrated power of the President. This Article presents a different vision. Drawing on in-depth interviews with officials from numerous agencies, we argue that everyday administrative practices themselves support accountability—an accountability of a kind that elections alone cannot achieve. The electoral story focuses on the aspect of accountability that kicks in as a sanction after decisions have already been made. We propose instead that the ongoing justification of policy positions to multiple audiences empowered to evaluate and challenge them forms the heart of accountability in a republican democracy. The continual process of reason-giving, testing, and adaptation instantiates the values that make accountability normatively attractive: deliberation, inclusivity, and responsiveness.
Our interviews reveal three primary features of the administrative state that support such accountability. First, political appointees and career civil servants, often presented as conflictual, actually enact complementary decisionmaking modalities. Appointees do not impose direct presidential control but imbue agencies with a diffuse, differentiated sense of abstract political values. Civil servants use expertise and experience to set the parameters within which decisions can be made. The process of moving these differing but interdependent approaches toward a decision promotes deliberation. Second, agencies work through a networked spiderweb of decisionmaking that involves continual justification and negotiation among numerous groups. This claim stands in stark contrast to the strict hierarchy often attributed to government bureaucracy: we show how the principal-agent model, frequently used to analyze agencies, obscures more than it reveals. The dispersion of decisionmaking power, we claim, promotes pluralistic inclusivity and provides more support for ongoing accountability than a concentration in presidential hands would. Finally, many two-way avenues connect agencies to the people and situations they regulate. Those required by law, like notice-and-comment rulemaking, supplement numerous other interaction formats that agencies create. These multiple avenues support agency responsiveness to the views of affected publics and the realities of the regulated world….(More)”.