Behavioral economics concepts can advance understanding, predicting, and controlling complex human behavior. Although there have been numerous attempts to apply behavioral economics concepts to applied settings, there are a limited number of experiments conducted in educational settings. The purpose of the studies in this paper is a to apply well-grounded scientific findings in behavioral economics to education to advance our understanding of teaching and learning and to develop cost-effective interventions. Study 1 (Kim et al., 2021) was a systematic review and meta-analysis on 24 token economy studies conducted in general and special education classrooms from kindergarten to 5th grade between 2000 and 2019. Eight token economy components and effect sizes were identified for each study and compared across different classroom types. The results showed that the token economy intervention yielded large effect sizes for both general and special education classroom types. There were differences in the usage of token components including backup reinforcer types, token production rate, and exchange production rate based on classroom types. In Study 2, the researchers conducted two experiments to develop a rapid, user-friendly assessment of delay discounting for educators interested in quantifying sensitivity to reward delays for school-aged children. The first experiment reanalyzed data collected by Reed and Martens (2011) and found that 1-month delay choices predicted student classroom behavior. The second experiment investigated the utility of the 1-month delay indifference point in predicting saving and spending behavior of second-grade students using token economies with two different token production schedules. Collectively, results showed that the 1-month delay indifference point predicted classroom behavior and children who discounted less and had greater self-regulation, accrued and saved more tokens. In Study 3, the researchers investigated the effects of a classwide progressive delay training procedure on students’ advantageous choice-making behavior, which is the behavior of selecting a larger, delayed outcome over a smaller, immediately available reinforcer. The intervention used progressive delay, which refers to incrementally increasing the temporal delay for a more delayed, advantageous outcome, and choice-making opportunities to promote second grade students’ choice of a larger reinforcer associated with a delay. The results showed mixed results – the intervention was effective at increasing advantageous choice-making behavior for students performing on and below grade-level for math, but the effects were not shown in students performing above grade-level. Study 4 further examined the educational importance of delayed consequences by determining the relationship between verbal behavior repertoires, delay discounting, and academic achievement. Specifically, the researchers used the degree of Incidental-Bidirectional Naming (Inc-BiN) for verbal behavior, degree of tolerance to delayed consequences using hypothetical binary choices involving money for delay discounting, and standardized math and reading scores for academic achievement. The results showed that participants with greater degree of Inc-BiN had significantly greater tolerance for delayed consequences. However, there was no relation found between academic achievement and delay discounting or Inc-BiN. Together, the four studies in this paper successfully (1) translated basic behavioral economics research findings to educational settings and (2) investigated methods that maximize efficiency and effectiveness of practices and tools used in classrooms.

Mobile devices and online services allow capturing an unprecedented amount of information about human behavior. In this dissertation, I use these new types of data to understand how the built environment affects social life and businesses in cities. In Chapter 1, I provide the first causal evidence that the provision of urban parks promotes opportunities for racially and ethnically diverse encounters. Utilizing a novel dataset featuring individual GPS tracking data for more than 60 thousand Twitter users in the New York metro area, I introduce a measure of racial diversity that captures one's level of exposure to diverse others in places visited daily. My empirical strategy relies on using the variation in the timing of park construction works across the city (that temporarily limit the capacity of said parks) to identify the impact of the effectively accessible parkland area on the individual exposure to racial diversity. My results show that for White and Black/African American residents additional 10 acres of parks within a 5 km radius from home increase individual chances of encounters with the members of other groups by 1 p.p. The effect is sizable: for reference, transitioning from the current state to the random mixing scenario would require a 9 p.p increase in diversity for an average Black or African American individual and a 3.5 p.p increase for an average White person. I also provide evidence to suggest that park accessibility affects the diversity of White and Black residents differently: for parks located closer to home, the effect appears to be more pronounced for Whites than Blacks. Chapter 2, written jointly with Dmitry Sedov, investigates the role of sports facilities in generating consumption spillovers for the local businesses. The construction of sports facilities, which can cost hundreds of millions of dollars, is often subsidized by public sources. In many cases, subsidies are allocated on the premise that sports venues benefit the local economy by bringing new customers to nearby businesses. We pin down the size and the spatial distribution of such spillovers using daily foot traffic data from mobile phones covering major sports league facilities and the surrounding commercial establishments. By employing the fixed effects and the IV estimation strategies, we show that the spillover benefits are heterogeneous across sports and business sectors. We find that 100 baseball stadium visits generate roughly 29 visits to nearby food & accommodation businesses and about 6 visits to local retail establishments. While the estimates for football stadiums are comparable, basketball & hockey arenas do not appear to generate significant spillovers for the surrounding businesses. Using our spillover estimates, we also compute an upper bound on the additional local spending induced by each sample arena. The median value of the additional spending turns out to be substantially smaller than the corresponding median subsidy to sports facilities in our sample. In Chapter 3, I examine the contribution of parks to social ties between neighborhoods in New York City. Although the role of public spaces in facilitating social interactions in cities has been widely discussed by social scientists and urban design scholars, data sets from online social networks present unexplored opportunities to quantify this link on a larger scale. I use data on friendship links between Facebook users across New York City zip codes to show that two neighborhoods with a higher density of green spaces between them are more likely to have stronger social ties. In particular, when controlling for demographic differences and zip-code level fixed effects, I find that a 1 p.p. increase in the percentage of land allocated to parks between two given zip codes is associated with a 1.2% higher chance of online social connection between their residents. Comparing the effects of park density for different types of parks, I further document that the presence of community parks, flagship parks, and playgrounds are all significant predictors of higher social connectedness between zip codes. Notably, the largest estimated effect is for playgrounds, indicating a 33% higher probability of connection per 1 p.p. increase in density.

This thesis consists of three chapters. The first chapter examines the impact of judicial discretion and left-digit bias on criminal sentencing outcomes. Judicial discretion allows judges to make nuanced decisions, taking into account details of legal cases that are not directly covered by law. However, judicial discretion can also expose behavioral biases and lead to irrational decision-making. I test for the existence of a particular behavioral bias: age-based left-digit bias. Specifically, I use a regression discontinuity design to test for changes in sentencing decisions occurring on an offender's 20th birthday using data on sentencing decisions from the state of Pennsylvania. I find that an offender sentenced just after his/her 20th birthday is 3.5 percentage points more likely to be sentenced to incarceration than an offender sentenced just before his/her 20th birthday. I test for evidence of conscious mechanisms underlying this effect and find no such evidence, leaving an unconscious bias as the best available explanation. Chapter two examines the impact of highly publicized police killings of black individuals on the racial gap in birth outcomes. Police killings of Black Americans are increasingly being met with significant media coverage and public response, including civil unrest. Given the frequency with which these events occur, it is vital to understand both their direct and indirect impacts. Using national birth certificate data and an event study design, I test for the impact of high-profile police-involved killings of Black Americans on racial disparities in maternal stress levels and birth outcomes. I find a large, statistically significant, and persistent increase in gestational hypertension of Black mothers relative to White mothers, strongly indicating an increase in the racial gap in maternal stress following these high-profile killings. I find limited evidence of an accompanying effect on the racial gap in birth outcomes. However, many existing papers similarly find no impacts of maternal stress on birth outcomes while simultaneously finding significant impacts on later-life outcomes, leaving room for additional future work based on these findings. How does the content of public communication by elected representatives change in response to highly salient, politically polarizing events? In Chapter 3, I examine this question using the text of tweets from members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, an n-gram text regression model and sentiment analysis alogorithms, and an event study design focused on mass shootings in the U.S. Observable effects on communication are concentrated on the day of and the day following a mass shooting. Republican members of Congress exhibit a reduced tweet frequency relative to Democratic members of Congress in the immediate aftermath of a shooting, while Democratic members of Congress speak with a more clearly differentiated Democratic vocabulary. Members from both parties speak with a more negative vocabulary. With Republicans collectively disengaging and Democrats collectively highlighting their partisan identification, this may suggest that Democrats are taking advantage of an opportunity for a political and/or policy win while Republicans in the same period are choosing to avoid additional political and/or policy losses.