Open Collections

Angeli, Deivis

University of British Columbia

Chapter 1 studies how expecting anti-favela discrimination among jobseekers in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, affects job-seeking behaviors. We document that most jobseekers overestimate anti-favela discrimination, as we measured in an ancillary study. Jobseekers randomly told that their interviewer would know their name and address believed that their interview performance was 0.17SD worse than those who were told that the interviewer would only know their name, and those who expected at-or-above median discrimination not only believed that they performed worse, but were also rated worse by 0.22SD. Average application rates are inelastic to expected anti-favela discrimination, but different interventions can relatively benefit white or non-white jobseekers. Chapter 2 studies whether, and when, tweets about racial justice predict costly race-related behaviors. Individuals who tweet about racial justice are less likely to discriminate against Black individuals and more likely to donate to a civil rights organization. However, three empirical patterns suggest that higher signalling stakes weaken this correlation. First, racial justice tweets became mostly uninformative during the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. Second, informativeness is driven by low-visibility types of tweets. Third, racial justice retweets are somewhat less informative of donation behavior than private statements of support. Chapter 3 analyzes a dynamic coordination model under quasi-hyperbolic discounting. I document a novel mechanism through which present bias can be adaptive: it can internalize the social cost of coordinating on a new action, say going from coordinating on using Twitter to using Threads. Agents migrating from Twitter to Threads ignore that migrating imposes negative externalities on those still using Twitter. So, to achieve efficiency, regular exponential discounters should ask for a higher relative quality of Threads before adopting it. As present biased agents overreact to the migration cost (a temporary loss of externalities), present bias leads to asking for more quality before migrations, preventing inefficiencies.

Text

2024-07-16

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88645

Economics

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/