Anti-social behaviour and economic decision-making: Panel experimental evidence in the wake of COVID-19.

We systematically examine the acute impact of exposure to a public health crisis on anti-social behaviour and economic decision-making using unique experimental panel data from China, collected just before the outbreak of COVID-19 and immediately after the first wave was overcome. Exploiting plausibly exogenous geographical variation in virus exposure coupled with a dataset of longitudinal experiments, we show that participants who were more intensely exposed to the virus outbreak became more anti-social than those with lower exposure, while other aspects of economic and social preferences remain largely stable. The finding is robust to multiple hypothesis testing and a similar, yet less pronounced pattern emerges when using alternative measures of virus exposure, reflecting societal concern and sentiment, constructed using social media data. The anti-social response is particularly pronounced for individuals who experienced an increase in depression or negative affect, which highlights the important role of psychological health as a potential mechanism through which the virus outbreak affected behaviour.

Air pollution and anti-social behaviour: Evidence from a randomised lab-in-the-field experiment.

We conducted a pre-registered randomised lab-in-the-field online experiment in Beijing, China, to explore the relationship between acute air pollution and anti-social behaviour. Our novel experimental design exploits naturally occurring discontinuities in pollution episodes to mimic an experimental setting in which pollution exposure is exogenously manipulated, thus allowing us to identify a causal relationship. Participants were randomly assigned to be surveyed on either high pollution or low pollution days, thereby exogenously varying the degree of pollution exposure. In addition, a subset of individuals surveyed on the high-pollution days received an additional 'pollution alert' to explore whether providing air pollution warnings influences (protective) behaviour. We used a set of well-established incentivised economic games to obtain clean measures of anti-social behaviour, as well as a range of secondary outcomes which may drive the proposed pollution-behaviour relationship. Our results indicate that exposure to acute air pollution had no statistically significant effect on anti-social behaviour, but significantly reduced both psychological and physiological well-being. However, these effects do not remain statistically significant after adjusting for multiple hypothesis testing. We find no evidence that pollution affects cognitive ability, present bias, discounting, or risk aversion, four potential pathways which may explain the relationship between pollution and anti-social behaviour. Our study adds to the growing calls for purposefully designed and pre-registered experiments that strengthen experimental (as opposed to correlational or quasi-experimental) identification and thus allow causal insights into the relationship between pollution and anti-social behaviour.

The impact of open access mandates on scientific research and technological development in the U.S.

Getting to a net-zero emissions economy requires faster development and diffusion of novel clean energy technologies. We exploit a rare natural experiment to study the impact of an open-access mandate on the diffusion of scientific research into patented technologies. From 2014 onwards, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) required its 17 National Laboratories (NLs) to publish all peer-reviewed scientific articles without a paywall. Using data from more than 300,000 scientific publications between 2012 and 2018, we show that scientific articles subject to the mandate were used on average 42% more in patents, despite embargo periods of up to 12 months. We also show that articles subject to the mandate were not cited more frequently by other academic articles. Our findings suggest that the mandate primarily contributed to technological development but has not led to additional academic research. Lastly, we show that small firms were the primary beneficiaries of the increased diffusion of scientific knowledge.