Julian Jamison

Julian Jamison
Verified
Julian verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
Verified
Julian verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
  • PhD
  • Professor at University of Exeter

About

122
Publications
13,432
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
2,580
Citations
Current institution
University of Exeter
Current position
  • Professor
Additional affiliations
University of Exeter
Position
  • Professor
October 2015 - present
World Bank
Position
  • Senior Behavioral Economist
November 2012 - October 2015
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
Position
  • Section Chief

Publications

Publications (122)
Article
Several small, short-term, or nonexperimental studies show that cognitive behavioral–informed interventions reduce antisocial behaviors over one to two years, but persistence research is rare. We followed 999 high-risk men in Liberia ten years after randomization into eight weeks of low-cost, nonspecialist-led therapy; $200 cash; both; or neither....
Article
This paper analyzes a randomized controlled trial of a personalized digital counseling intervention addressing informational constraints and choice architecture, cross-randomized with discounts for long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs), such as intrauterine devices (IUDs). The counseling intervention encourages shared decision-making (SDM)...
Article
We experimentally evaluate group-based financial education, savings account access, or both for members of Ugandan youth groups. We measure both short- and long-run impacts with one- and five- year endline household surveys. Education, but not account access, increases measured financial knowledge and trust at one-year. At five-years, knowledge eff...
Article
A randomized encouragement design yields null average effects of a credit builder loan (CBL) on consumer credit scores. But machine learning algorithms indicate the nulls are due to stark, offsetting treatment effects depending on baseline installment credit activity. Delinquency on preexisting loan obligations drives the negative effects, suggesti...
Article
This paper examines the links between adverse events, depression, and decision-making in Nigeria. It investigates how events such as conflicts, shocks, and deaths of family members can affect short-term mental health, as well as longer-term decisions on economic activities and human capital investments. First, the findings show that exposure to con...
Preprint
Full-text available
In this Registered Report, we investigated the impact of a poverty alleviation program on cognitive performance. We analyzed data from a randomized controlled trial conducted on low-income, high-risk individuals in Liberia where a random half of the participants (n=251) received a $200 lump-sum unconditional cash transfer - equivalent approximately...
Preprint
In most societies, a small number of people commit most of the serious crimes and violence. Short-term studies have shown that cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can reduce such antisocial behaviors. There are some signs that these behavior changes may be temporary, however, especially from therapy on its own. This is unsettled, however, for there...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction Reduction of unmet need for contraception is associated with enhanced health outcomes. We conducted a randomised controlled trial in Mozambique analysing the effects of text messages encouraging use of family planning services. Methods This trial was conducted within a sample of women served by the Integrated Family Planning Program i...
Article
Technological advances are enabling roles for machines that present novel ethical challenges. The study of 'AI ethics' has emerged to confront these challenges, and connects perspectives from philosophy, computer science, law, and economics. Less represented in these interdisciplinary efforts is the perspective of cognitive science. We propose a fr...
Article
Full-text available
Classic theories suggest that common pool resources are subject to overexploitation. Community-based resource management approaches may ameliorate tragedy of the commons effects. Here we use a randomized evaluation in Namibia’s communal rangelands to study a comprehensive four-year program to support community-based rangeland and cattle management....
Article
Full-text available
Covid-19 and the measures taken to contain it have led to unprecedented constraints on work and leisure activities, across the world. This paper uses nationally representative surveys to document how people of different ages and incomes have been affected in the early phase of the pandemic. The data was collected in six countries (China, South Kore...
Article
Full-text available
Objective Countries have adopted different approaches, at different times, to reduce the transmission of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Cross-country comparison could indicate the relative efficacy of these approaches. We assess various nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), comparing the effects of voluntary behavior change and of changes e...
Article
Full-text available
Given the role of human behavior in the spread of disease, it is vital to understand what drives people to engage in or refrain from health-related behaviors during a pandemic. This paper examines factors associated with the adoption of self-protective health behaviors, such as social distancing and mask wearing, at the start of the Covid-19 pandem...
Preprint
Full-text available
Classic theories suggest that common pool resources are subject to overexploitation. Community-based resource management approaches may ameliorate “tragedy of the commons” effects. Using a randomized evaluation in Namibia’s communal rangelands, we find that a comprehensive four-year program to support community-based rangeland and cattle management...
Article
Full-text available
In recent years, tax authorities around the world have started using behavioral insights to encourage taxpayers to fulfill their obligations. We review and discuss some of the recent empirical literature on tax compliance. In line with recent trends, we report on a field experiment in collaboration with the tax authority of Latvia (SRS) to encourag...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background: Countries have adopted different approaches, at different times, to reduce the transmission of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Cross-country comparison could indicate the relative efficacy of these approaches. We assess various non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) over time, comparing the effects of self-imposed (i.e. voluntary)...
Article
We perform the first rigorous test of a rules of thumb–based approach to financial education on consumer behavior and outcomes. We test two rules of thumb that are targeted at reducing credit card revolving and deliver them in a randomized fashion via email, online banner, and physical mailer. Using monthly administrative data and pre‐ and postinte...
Article
Full-text available
Bureaucratic performance is a crucial determinant of economic growth, but little real-world evidence exists on how to improve it, especially in resource-constrained settings. We conducted a field experiment of a social recognition intervention to improve record keeping in health facilities in two Nigerian states, replicating the intervention – impl...
Article
Full-text available
This brief provides evidence from World Bank field experiments that consider the social, psychological, and economic factors influencing taxpayer decision-making. Complementary studies from Costa Rica, Guatemala, Poland, Latvia, and Kosovo demonstrate how context-specific, behaviorally informed messaging can offer an immediate, low-cost solution to...
Chapter
Although inequality in survival is highly correlated with life expectancy, the authors believe that this form of health inequality should be better understood and that inequality in survival could be another useful summary measure of population health. It is also a motivation for assigning priority to the worse-off in priority-setting. Inequality i...
Article
Full-text available
We exploit the principles of choice architecture to evaluate interventions in the market for reloadable prepaid cards. Participants are randomized into three card menu presentation treatments—the market status quo, a regulation-inspired reform, or an enhanced reform designed to minimize attribute overload—and offered choices based on prior structur...
Article
Full-text available
Although the concept of randomized assignment in order to control for extraneous confounding factors reaches back hundreds of years, the first empirical use appears to have been in an 1835 trial of homeopathic medicine. Throughout the 19 th century there was a growing awareness of the need for comparison groups, albeit often without the realization...
Article
Full-text available
The primary focus of this paper is to offer guidance on the analysis of time streams of effects that a project may have so that they can be discounted appropriately. This requires a framework that identifies the common parameters that need to be assessed, whether conducting cost-effectiveness or benefit-cost analysis. The quantification and convers...
Article
Full-text available
Bureaucratic performance is a crucial determinant of economic growth. Little is known about how to improve it in resource-constrained settings. This study describes a field trial of a social recognition intervention to improve record keeping in clinics in two Nigerian states, replicating the intervention-implemented by a single organization on bure...
Article
We conduct laboratory experiments to investigate how private and public information affect the selection of an environmental innovation and the timing of its adoption. The results reveal behavioral patterns underlying the “energy efficiency gap” in which consumers and firms delay adoption of cost-effective energy and environmental innovations. Our...
Article
We show that a number of noncognitive skills and preferences, including patience and identity, are malleable in adults, and that investments in them reduce crime and violence. We recruited criminally engaged men and randomized one-half to eight weeks of cognitive behavioral therapy designed to foster self-regulation, patience, and a noncriminal ide...
Article
International development policy is ripe for an overhaul. Behavioral science can help policymakers to spur changes in behaviors that are difficult to explain from a conventional economic perspective and impede economic development. We focus here on two well-documented, often coinciding psychological phenomena that have particularly wide-ranging imp...
Article
Low incomes, limited financial literacy, fraud, and deception are just a few of the many intractable economic and social factors that contribute to the financial difficulties that households face today. Addressing these issues directly is difficult and costly. But poor financial outcomes also result from systematic psychological tendencies, includi...
Article
Empirical social science relies heavily on self-reported data, but subjects may misreport behaviors, especially sensitive ones such as crime or drug abuse. If a treatment influences survey misreporting, it biases causal estimates. We develop a validation technique that uses intensive qualitative work to assess survey misreporting and pilot it in a...
Article
Full-text available
We show that extremely poor, war-affected women in northern Uganda have high returns to a package of $150 cash, five days of business skills training, and ongoing supervision. Sixteen months after grants, participants doubled their microenterprise ownership and incomes, mainly from petty trading. We also show these ultrapoor have too little social...
Article
Full-text available
By 2009, two decades of war and widespread displacement left the majority of the population of Northern Uganda impoverished. Methods. This study used a cluster-randomized design to test the hypothesis that a poverty alleviation program would improve economic security and reduce symptoms of depression in a sample of mostly young women. Roughly 120...
Article
We conducted experiments during trick-or-treating on Halloween in a predominantly liberal neighborhood in the weeks preceding the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections. We decorated one side of a house porch with McCain material in 2008 (Romney material in 2012) and the other side with Obama material. Children were asked to choose a side, with half...
Article
Full-text available
Intimate partner violence is widespread and represents an obstacle to human freedom and a significant public health concern. Poverty alleviation programs and efforts to economically "empower" women have become popular policy options, but theory and empirical evidence are mixed on the relationship between women's empowerment and the experience of vi...
Article
The paper shows that self-control, time preferences, and values are malleable in adults, and that investments in these skills and preferences reduce crime and violence. The authors recruited criminally-engaged Liberian men and randomized half to eight weeks of group cognitive behavioral therapy, fostering self-regulation, patience, and noncriminal...
Article
Full-text available
We conducted laboratory experiments to investigate how private and public information affect the selection and timing of technology adoption. Our treatments relax the fixed order imposed by the standard herding experiments, but they maintain information parity across subjects and in opportunities for private and social learning. In each round, subj...
Article
We present new results on the relationship between health behaviors and experimental measures of time and risk preferences. In contrast to recent findings in the economics literature, we find no evidence of a link between time preference and self-reported health behaviors and outcomes such as smoking and BMI. We also introduce evidence that interna...
Article
Full-text available
We study the dynamic structure of equilibria in game theory. Allowing players in a game the opportunity to renegotiate, or switch to a feasible and Pareto superior equilibrium, can lead to welfare gains. However, in an extensive-form game this can also make it more difficult to enforce punishment strategies, leading to the question of which equilib...
Article
We present two simple situations in which SPE or NE fail to exist, even though intuition and the motivations for the definitions strongly suggest that they ought to. That is, nonexistence is due merely to technical barriers rather than fundamental barriers inherent in the structure of the situations (as occurs e.g. with auctions). Possibly resoluti...
Article
Do the “ultra-poor” have high returns to capital or are they otherwise constrained? Impoverished Ugandans, mostly women, were experimentally offered individual business training, $150, supervision, and business advising. We evaluated the full package plus the marginal effects of components: supervision (pressure to invest); advice; and stronger soc...
Article
Empirical social science relies heavily on self-reported data, but subjects may misreport behaviors, especially sensitive ones such as crime or drug abuse. If a treatment influences survey responses, it biases causal estimates. We develop a validation technique that uses intensive qualitative work to assess survey misreporting and pilot it in a fie...
Article
We conducted laboratory experiments to investigate how private and public information affect the selection and timing of technology adoption. Our experiments extend the stan-dard herding model to more accurately represent the innovation decision problem. Subjects drew private signals and observed actions of their peer group before making an irrever...
Article
Full-text available
We evaluate the impact of a health information intervention implemented through mobile phones, using a clustered randomized control trial augmented by qualitative interviews. The intervention aimed to improve sexual health knowledge and shift individuals towards safer sexual behavior by providing reliable information about sexual health. The novel...
Article
Full-text available
Players in economic situations often have preferences not only over their own outcome but also over what happens to fellow players, entirely apart from any strategic considerations. While this can be modeled directly by simply writing down final preferences, these are commonly unknown a priori. In many cases it is therefore both helpful and instruc...
Chapter
This volume explores from multiple perspectives the subtle and interesting relationship between the theory of rational choice and Darwinian evolution. In rational choice theory, agents are assumed to make choices that maximize their utility; in evolution, natural selection 'chooses' between phenotypes according to the criterion of fitness maximizat...
Article
Full-text available
The authors study the responses to several questions related to real estate that were added to the Michigan Survey of Consumers in July and August 2011. In particular, they asked about attitudes toward renting versus buying a home, about commuting, and about how much to spend on a mortgage. By matching the results to data (at the ZIP-code level) ab...
Article
Full-text available
The authors evaluated the use of conditional cash transfers as an HIV and sexually transmitted infection prevention strategy to incentivise safe sex. An unblinded, individually randomised and controlled trial. 10 villages within the Kilombero/Ulanga districts of the Ifakara Health and Demographic Surveillance System in rural south-west Tanzania. Th...
Article
The authors extend the standard public goods game in a variety of ways, in particular by allowing for endogenous preference over institutions and by studying the relationship between individual types, their preferences, and later behavior within the various institutional environments. They collect individual data on a variety of demographic factors...
Article
Full-text available
This paper introduces the concepts of amount and speed of a discounting procedure in order to generate well-characterized families of procedures for use in social project evaluation. Exponential discounting sequesters the concepts of amount and speed into a single parameter that needs to be disaggregated in order to characterize nonconstant rate pr...
Article
Recent work in several fields has established that humans can adopt binding “behavioral†preferences and convincingly signal those preferences to other humans, either via their behavior or via their body language / tone of voice. In this paper, we model the strategic implications of this ability. Our thesis is that through a person's lifetime th...
Article
Reflecting an increasing awareness of the importance of treatment adherence on outcomes in psychiatric populations, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) convened a panel of treatment adherence researchers on September 27-28, 2007 to discuss and articulate potential solutions for dealing with methodological adherence research challenges. P...
Article
We propose that individuals consider future versions of themselves to truly be separate persons, not simply as a convenient modeling device but in terms of actual brain systems and decision-making processes. Intertemporal choices are thus quite literally strategic interactions between multiple agents. Previous neuroscientific studies have found evi...
Article
We conduct a two-phase laboratory experiment, separated by several weeks. In the first phase, we conduct urn games intended to measure ambiguity aversion on a representative population of undergraduate students. In the second phase, we invite the students back with four different solicitation treatments, varying in the ambiguity of information rega...
Article
Full-text available
A long-standing puzzle in economics and biology is why humans and animals sometimes appear to act non-rationally when interacting with con-specifics. An example is that humans and animals sometimes are altruistic to non-kin. Previous work shows how non-rationality by a player in a single game within a sequence of repeated games can be optimal. Here...
Article
We propose that individuals consider future versions of themselves to truly be separate persons, not simply as a convenient modeling device but in terms of actual brain systems and decision-making processes. Intertemporal choices are thus quite literally strategic interactions between multiple agents. Previous neuroscientific studies have found evi...

Network

Cited By