Working Paper

The following three papers, which I really enjoyed working on, comprise my PhD dissertation.

• [JMP - Public Econ] Spillovers in the Charitable Market: Evidence from Reputation Shocks (sole-author)

Revise & Resubmit at Economic Journal

This paper provides novel evidence on the spillover effect of negative reputation shocks affecting a charity on donations to other charities. I identify negative reputation shocks to large charities by using sentiment analysis on the universe of news articles in the United Kingdom. I then link these large charities to all other charities by constructing measures of textual similarity between charities’ mission statements. I find that a negative reputation shock to a charity increases donations to other charities that share similar objectives. This finding is consistent with the charity market being a differentiated market in which donors care about charities’ missions and substitute across charities with similar objectives. 

• [JMP - Environmental Econ] Only in My Backyard: The Effect of Flood Exposure on Environmental Behavior (sole-author)

Revise & Resubmit at Journal of Environmental Economics and Management

Does exposure to climate shocks make people behave more pro-environmentally? I use precise residential locations to identify people exposed to floods and analyse real-world donation records from 90,000 donors in England, along with longitudinal surveys. I show that, after being directly affected by floods, people are more likely to donate to environmental charities and support the Green Party. I also find suggestive evidence that people tend to reassess their own environmental effort as not enough after direct flood experience. However, exposure to floods affecting close neighbours does not elicit similar behavioural changes, indicating an “only in my backyard” phenomenon: on average, people react to climate shocks only when personally affected. Further, I show that people with strong universalist values do increase green donations after neighbouring floods. This suggests that the broader lack of response is driven by those with communitarian values, who typically care less about global environmental challenges.

• Emotional Appeal: Why Do Charities Use Negative Framing? (sole-author)

I collected three million images from Twitter posts by around 2,000 charities and trained a deep learning model to predict the emotions these images evoke. I find that charities differ in their emotional tone in ways largely unrelated to their stated missions. Moreover, donors’ preferences for emotional content vary and are correlated with their socioeconomic backgrounds and moral values. For example, better-educated donors and moral universalists are more likely to favour charities that use negative emotional appeals. As a result, charities have an incentive to maintain a specific emotional tone to differentiate themselves and attract particular donors. In addition, charities may use shock tactics – delivering sudden and intense negative emotions – to boost donations. Supporting this, I show that negative emotional shocks lead to immediate increases in donations, but their effectiveness diminishes with repeated use. Thus, charities need balance short-term gains with the risk of long-term donor fatigue, incentivising them to deploy shock tactics only sporadically.

Research in Progress

• The Impact of War-on-woke on Progressive Values and Prosocial Actions (with Sarah Smith)

• Do Crises Increase Parochial Altruism? Evidence from COVID (with Esteban Jaimovich and Sarah Smith)

• Toward Understanding Decision-making by Charities (with Andreas Lange, Jonathan Meer and Jan Schmitz)

Teaching

• Data Analytics (postgraduate)

• Economics Data (undergraduate)

• Mathematics for Economics (undergraduate)

• Econometrics II (undergraduate)