Alerts work! Air quality warnings and cycling

Alert programs are central to strategies to reduce pollution exposure and manage its impact. To be effective alerts have to change behavior, but evidence that they do that is sparse. Indeed the majority of published studies fail to find a significant impact of alerts on the outcome behavior that they study. Alerts particularly seek to influence energetic cardio-vascular outdoor pursuits. This study is the first to use administrative data to show that they are effective in reducing participation in such a pursuit (namely cycle use in Sydney, Australia), and to our knowledge the first to show that they are effective in changing any behavior in a non-US setting. We are careful to disentangle possible reactions to realised air quality from the ‘pure’, causal effect of the issuance of an alert. Our results suggest that when an air quality alert is issued, the amount of cycling is reduced by 14–35%, which is a substantial behavioral response. The results are robust to the inclusion of a battery of controls in various combinations, alternative estimation methods and non-linear specifications. We develop various sub-sample results, and also find evidence of alert fatigue

Temperature and decisions: evidence from 207,000 court cases

We analyze the impact of outdoor temperature on high-stakes decisions (immigration adjudications) made by professional decision-makers (US immigration judges). In our preferred specification, which includes spatial, temporal and judge fixed effects, and controls for various potential confounders, a 10 °F degree increase in case-day temperature reduces decisions favorable to the applicant by 6.55%. This is despite judgements being made indoors, 'protected' by climate-control. Results are consistent with established links from temperature to mood and risk appetite and have important implications for evaluating the influence of climate on 'cognitive output'

Temperature and decisions: evidence from 207,000 court cases

We analyze the impact of outdoor temperature on high-stakes decisions (immigration adjudications) made by professional decision-makers (US immigration judges). In our preferred specification, which includes spatial, temporal and judge fixed effects, and controls for various potential confounders, a 10 °F degree increase in case-day temperature reduces decisions favorable to the applicant by 6.55%. This is despite judgements being made indoors, 'protected' by climate-control. Results are consistent with established links from temperature to mood and risk appetite and have important implications for evaluating the influence of climate on 'cognitive output'

Pollution and learning:Causal evidence from Obama’s Iran sanctions

We provide evidence of a substantial impact of pollution in the vicinity of a school on student learning using standardized test results from the universe of Tehran junior schools. Causal identification exploits that the 2010 US sanctions prevented the sale of refined petroleum products to Iran which differentially impacted air quality at schools in the city, depending on the location of each with respect to the road network. Relative performance dropped at more road-exposed (variously-measured) schools. Roads upwind appear to have four times the impact compared to those downwind, aligning with the prevailing wind direction which blows 80% of the time from the west, a finding that also provides compelling evidence against alternative interpretations

Pollution and learning:Causal evidence from Obama’s Iran sanctions

We provide evidence of a substantial impact of pollution in the vicinity of a school on student learning using standardized test results from the universe of Tehran junior schools. Causal identification exploits that the 2010 US sanctions prevented the sale of refined petroleum products to Iran which differentially impacted air quality at schools in the city, depending on the location of each with respect to the road network. Relative performance dropped at more road-exposed (variously-measured) schools. Roads upwind appear to have four times the impact compared to those downwind, aligning with the prevailing wind direction which blows 80% of the time from the west, a finding that also provides compelling evidence against alternative interpretations

Finance and green growth: A comment on De Haas and Popov (2023)

De Haas and Popov (2023) estimate the effect of country-level financial sector size and structure on decarbonization to show that countries with relatively more equity versus debt financing have more emission-efficient economies. We uncover multiple coding errors that change the magnitude and the precision of the coefficients of interest. These coding errors include misreporting of standard errors, and misspecifying generalized method of moments (GMM) estimators. We further provide robustness tests of the results to (1) restricting the sample to consistent sets of countries across the country and country-byindustry samples, and (2) using a limited information maximum likelihood (LIML) estimator to address a weak-instrument problem. We find that the results from the robustness checks are qualitatively different from the original results but similar to the corrected results

Mass Reproducibility and Replicability: A New Hope

This study pushes our understanding of research reliability by reproducing and replicating claims from 110 papers in leading economic and political science journals. The analysis involves computational reproducibility checks and robustness assessments. It reveals several patterns. First, we uncover a high rate of fully computationally reproducible results (over 85%). Second, excluding minor issues like missing packages or broken pathways, we uncover coding errors for about 25% of studies, with some studies containing multiple errors. Third, we test the robustness of the results to 5,511 re-analyses. We find a robustness reproducibility of about 70%. Robustness reproducibility rates are relatively higher for re-analyses that introduce new data and lower for re-analyses that change the sample or the definition of the dependent variable. Fourth, 52% of re-analysis effect size estimates are smaller than the original published estimates and the average statistical significance of a re-analysis is 77% of the original. Lastly, we rely on six teams of researchers working independently to answer eight additional research questions on the determinants of robustness reproducibility. Most teams find a negative relationship between replicators' experience and reproducibility, while finding no relationship between reproducibility and the provision of intermediate or even raw data combined with the necessary cleaning codes