Research

Working Papers

Sports Betting Legalization and Family Risk: Evidence from Child Protective Services Investigations

This study explores the unintended consequences of sports betting legalization on child maltreatment. Using administrative Child Protective Services case data and a staggered difference-in-differences framework, I estimate the causal effect of sports gambling on the number, type, and disposition of maltreatment investigations. I find that following sports gambling legalization, states experience a higher rate of investigations of maltreatment. The effect is driven by states that legalize mobile sports betting and is experienced by primarily white children. Rural areas experience a slightly higher increase in the rate of reports relative to urban areas. Based on previous literature, I outline two potential pathways for these effects: an amplification of emotional cues from bad sports/gambling outcomes, and the family stress of accumulated financial hardship. While reports of child maltreatment generally increase following unexpected losses of local football teams, I do not find that this is amplified by legal gambling. Instead, the long horizon over which effects emerge suggests a financial hardship pathway.

A Classroom Experiment: Exploring Bid-Rent Theory

This paper proposes an experiment for the urban economics classroom to teach the intuition behind bid-rent curves. Classroom experiments seek to engage students in the active learning of material by developing their inductive reasoning skills—turning data to models. The challenge with classroom experiments is that they can be hard to scale. This experiment was developed for a class of 90 students, and can be scaled down to smaller classes between 20-30 students. It uses a first-price sealed-bid auction with multiple winners to allocate “parcels of land” which only vary in quality by their distance to the city center. Using the data collected from the experiment, students can derive the bid-rent curves of various agents and observe how learning occurs across game rounds.

Works in Progress

Artifical Aging and Face Morphing: Testing the Double Standard of Aging Hypothesis

with Mary Kite

We introduce a novel method, artificial aging and face morphing, to test how people perceive old age based on a target’s gender and race. Undergraduates (N = 170) were shown six slide decks with automatic progression in the lab which showed a face transitioning from young to old (or old to young). Participants were instructed to stop the slide deck when the face had started to look old (young). The stopped frame value was recorded for each video. Participants then reported their thoughts while doing the morphs, provided attractiveness ratings and age anchors for all of the faces they viewed, and completed a demographic questionnaire. The stopped frame was compared by a 4 (Target Race) X 2 (Target Gender) ANOVA. Results showed significant main effects for target gender (p < 0.009), target race (p < 0.03), and an interaction effect between race and gender (p < 0.03). I will introduce the results in the context of stopped frames and open up a discussion on the value of imputing target race as an alternative.

Faces retrieved from Chicago Face Database

Together in Purpose, Not Persona: Leader Identity’s impact on Volunteer Effort

In the context of nonprofits, I explore the effect of a leader’s gender and sexuality on volunteer motivation. I propose an experiment using both stated and revealed measures to investigate the effect of a leader’s identity on volunteers attitudes and performance. I find that women in positions of leadership are rated as more typical more effective than their male peers. I do not find evidence that leader gender or sexuality have a direct effect on follower performance. I discuss how follower’s group identities and their personal attitudes towards the nonprofit they are volunteering for interact with these results.