Impact of Gratitude

Interesting study from Nelson-Coffey et a. (2023) showing the positive impact of both felt and expressed gratitude.  First, in a 7-day daily experience study conducted in 2018 (N = 270), daily gratitude predicted greater well-being and family functioning, controlling for daily happiness, coder-rated care difficulty, and sociodemographics. Second, in a short-term longitudinal experiment conducted in…

Treatment effect heterogeneity, self-selection into RCTs, and racial disparities

In drug development, clinical trials typically aim for a population that is representative of the patients who would be eligible for the treatment. While randomized controlled trials (RCTs) typically focus on measuring the average health impact of a drug across this population, a paper Basu and Gurjal (2020) argue that treatment effect heterogeneity and self-selection…

How good are you at ‘X’?

Where X can be basically any task. Likely your answer is that you are pretty good at X. In fact, you probably think you are above average. There is an explanation for this: the Dunning-Kruger effect. This is a bias where people generally believe they are better at a task than they are. This effect…

Is Uber a substitute for ambulances?

According to a paper by Moskatel and Slutsky (2019), the answer appears to be ‘yes’. In this paper, we ask whether UberX’s entry into a city caused substitution away from traditional ambulances for low‐risk patients, reducing overall volume. Using a city‐panel over‐time and leverage that UberX enter markets sporadically over multiple years, we find that…

Open-Source Publishing

An interesting new approach to academic article publishing as described by Josh Cohen from Tufts University: Open-peer review journals preserve scientific review by conducting reviews after the article’s initial release. Review takes place in the open, with comments and the peer reviewer’s name published online, along with the article authors’ responses and revised manuscript, and…