Steven D. Levitt’s research while affiliated with University of Chicago and other places

... Here, we focus on experimental studies that compare rich and poor subjects, focusing on differences in their response to fundraising practices. In a field experiment targeting a sample of high-capacity potential donors (those who were estimated to have a median annual giving capacity greater than US$25,000), Levin et al. (2016) find that the behavior of wealthier alumni is consistent with many prior studies of ordinary donors. Andreoni et al. (2017) and Smeets et al. (2015) find different results that wealthy donors are more prosocial in specific settings. ...

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High-Capacity Donors’ Preferences for Charitable Giving

... Ao contrário, quando os custos esperados ficam abaixo dos possíveis benefícios, o agente tende a não cometer o delito. Em síntese: o agente cometerá o ato se, e somente se, a sanção esperada for menor do que os benefícios esperados (LEVITT, 2008). ...

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Regimes Jurídicos de Colaboração e multi-institucionalidade: um Olhar ao Sistema do Accountability Horizontal à Luz da Teoria dos Jogos

... Some studies find that, compared to selling houses for their clients, agents will leave their own houses on the market longer and enjoy a higher price [7,24] . Others find that using agents in transactions has no impact on housing prices, but accelerates sales time [8,25,26] . Competition among agents is absent in these studies, and housing prices are usually lowered due to the principal-agent problem. ...

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Competition of Real Estate Agents and Housing Prices in Urban China

... school-level or group-based teacher incentive systems, finding no or modest effects of such compensation schemes, particularly when incentives to free ride are stronger and when students are assessed in low-stakes exams. 3 Finally, in a behavioural field experiment in Illinois, Fryer et al. (2022) find that financial incentives for teachers may indeed be effective if their design induces loss aversion. Several other studies focus on the cases of developing countries and find conflicting evidence. ...

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Effects of individual incentive reforms in the public sector: the case of teachers

... Similarly decreasing trends in crime were subsequently observed in other developed countries, including Canada (Ouimet 2004), England and Wales (Ganpat et al. 2022), as well as Australia (Mayhew 2012), among many others. Rather unsurprisingly, the reasons provided for the crime drop are myriad and include, among others, increased incarceration (Levitt 2004), the legalization of abortion (Donohue and Levitt 2020), strong and/or expanding economies (Fernández-Molina and Gutiérrez 2020), immigration (Ignatans and Matthews 2017), as well as the implementation of various situational crime prevention measures (Farrell et al. 2011). These multitude of explanations led, in part, to Farrell et al. (2014) outlining four evidence-based standardized 'tests' that each explanation (hypothesis) needed to 'pass' in order to be considered a suitable reason for why crime has declined. ...

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The crime drop in South Africa: an exploratory research note

... Consistent with evidence from developmental psychology (e.g., Havron et al., 2019), a recent study in economics documents better vocabulary and fine motor skills for children with older sisters (rather than brothers) in Kenya (Jakiela et al., 2020), although recent evidence suggests that this result may not be universal (Havron et al., 2022). 11 See Cunha and Heckman (2007), Baker et al. (2008), Heckman (2013, Heckman et al. (2013), Felfe and Lalive (2018), Cornelissen and Dustmann (2019), Bernal et al. (2019), Cappelen et al. (2020), Fort et al. (2020), Fryer et al. (2020, Attanasio et al. (2022b), Agostinelli et al. (2022), Bjorvatn et al. (2022). 12 Heckman (2007), Heckman (2013), Heckman et al. (2013), Attanasio et al. (2022b) and Bjorvatn et al. (2022) document the long-term advantages in cognition, educational achievement, non-cognitive skills and earnings associated with the provision of early daycare among disadvantaged communities in the US, Latin America, and peri-urban areas of Uganda. ...

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It makes a village: child care and prosociality

... The advice 'never give up' has been uniquely disproven. A trial that randomly assigned people considering quitting to either a quitting condition or a non-quitting condition, found that the quitters did not regret their decisions and where better off than the non-quitters who often regretted not quitting earlier (1). This could be a direct result of athletes overly promoting the "never give up" approach as virtuous. ...

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Toward a Speedrunning Economy

... One of the most common means of cheating is collusion, in which small groups of students collaborate to copy each other's answers. Many methods have been proposed to detect collusion from exam data (Angoff (1974), Frary et al. (1977), Belleza & Belleza (1989), Jennings et al. (1996), Wesolowsky (2000), McManus et al. (2005), Sotaridona et al. (2006) (2015), Richmond & Roehner (2015), Romero et al. (2015), Maynes (2016), Fendler et al. (2018), Lin & Levitt (2020)). These methods use the answers from multiple-choice exams-for example, choices {a, b, c, d, or e} or {true or false} for each question-and identify pairs of students who share an unusually high number of answers. ...

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Question-Score Identity Detection (Q-SID): A Statistical Algorithm to Detect Collusion Groups with Error Quantification from Exam Question Scores

... The effective abortion rate for murder from Donohue and Levitt (2020) is included because there is some evidence that legalized abortion could affect crime rates. Unfortunately, the Donohue and Levitt (2020) sample ends in 2014 and computation of the effective abortion rate is complicated. ...

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Does the Federal Law Forbidding People under Domestic Violence Restraining Orders from Possessing Firearms Save Lives?

... They also conclude from a recurrence plot that human play is "less complex and more deterministic" than pseudorandom data. A prior study on a different dataset has rejected uniform random play for 18% of "experienced" RPS players based on a chi-squared test (Batzilis et al. 2019). In comparison, our chi-squared test rejected uniform frequencies of play for 7.2% of the subjects. ...

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Nonparametric Strategy Test