Date of Award
Summer 2024
Degree Type
Open Access Dissertation
Degree Name
Economics, PhD
Program
School of Social Science, Politics, and Evaluation
Advisor/Supervisor/Committee Chair
Paul J. Zak
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
C. Mónica Capra
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Gregory DeAngelo
Terms of Use & License Information
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License.
Rights Information
© 2024 Michael Krouse
Subject Categories
Economics
Abstract
In my first chapter, my co-authors and I1 estimate the effect of current affective states on reported satisfaction with life. The satisfaction with life scale is a well-established measure of thriving and its use for both research and behavioral interventions requires understanding how external factors influence participants’ evaluations of their lives. We tested whether influencing participants’ affective states using videos would change their reported satisfaction with life in a representative sample of US adults (N=788). Those for whom the video improved affect reported 5.9% lower satisfaction with life compared to nonresponders (p=.008). This result was driven by young adults, women, individuals with high trait empathy as well as those with low agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism. These drivers were confirmed by quantifying feature importance using extreme gradient boosting. Estimating a mediation model of the change in affect on satisfaction with life showed these results continued to hold when controlling for personality traits and income. Our analyses show the importance of measuring and removing the influence of current affective states when measuring satisfaction with life so that the resulting data are more meaningful and actionable.
In my second chapter, my co-author and I investigate the effectiveness of two video treatments in influencing views on economic freedom. The relationship between economic freedom and improvements in social and economic outcomes is well-documented. Yet, the US and many developed countries are encountering increasing support for government control of voluntary exchange in markets. The present study developed a library of short videos describing the benefits of economic freedom and choose two that induced high and low neurologic responses in Study 1. In Study 2, a representative sample of US adults were randomly assigned to watch one of the two videos or a no-video control. We first identified demographic categories who had statistically low support for economic freedom (Californians, those with low incomes, Democrats, young adults, individuals without a college education, people receiving substantial government support, and women). Next, we showed that one video increased support for economic freedom among Californians and the other among those receiving government welfare. Robustness analyses demonstrated that the videos resulted in 5-10% increases in support for economic freedom in these two groups. A feature importance analysis was used to rank the demographic factors that increase or decrease the support for economic freedom. We conclude with suggestions on how videos can have a greater effect on support for economic freedom by developing emotionally-compelling stories of human flourishing.
In my third chapter, I investigate the causal impact of the uncertainty of outcome on attendance at Major League Baseball games over thirteen seasons, seeking to replicate and extend Coates et al. (2014). Using an instrumental variable design exploiting the quasi-random assignment of umpires to MLB games, I find a significant effect of outcome uncertainty on consumer demand for live game attendance providing further causal evidence that baseball game consumers exhibit reference dependant preferences with loss aversion.
ISBN
9798383703861
Recommended Citation
Krouse, Michael. (2024). Seemingly Unrelated Research in Economics. CGU Theses & Dissertations, 850. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/850.
