See below from Professor Anna Davies from Trinity College Dublin:
Future Earth Ireland are pleased to invite you to our annual event at the Royal Irish Academy on Friday November 17th at 10.45am
This year we are focusing on the important issue of behaviour change and climate change with an exciting line-up of international speakers and national leaders in behaviour change.
Future Earth Ireland is the National Committee of the global programme Future Earth:
Future Earth is a major international research platform providing the knowledge and support to accelerate transformations to a sustainable world. Launched in 2015, Future Earth is a 10-year initiative to advance Global Sustainability Science, build capacity in this rapidly expanding area of research and provide an international research agenda to guide natural and social scientists working around the world. But it is also a platform for international engagement to ensure that knowledge is generated in partnership with society and users of science. We are closely engaged in international processes such as the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and climate and biodiversity agreements (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and theConvention on Biological Diversity).
On November 10th, we welcome back the distinguished Harvard Law Professor, Cass Sunstein to Dublin. Professor Sunstein will deliver three sessions over the course of the afternoon:
1. The first session will take place from 130pm to 245pm in the UCD Geary Institute and will follow up from his recent talk on new directions in behavioural public policy below. It is aimed at people working directly in this area in Ireland and will be interactive and address practical and conceptual issues in applying this work. We have invited people directly and we welcome expressions of interest for attending from people working on applications of this area in Ireland to be made to geary@ucd.ie
Venue: UCD Geary Institute Seminar Room
130pm: Introduction and Welcome
135pm: Pete Lunn (ESRI): ESRI Research on Behavioural Economics
145pm: Fiona Kiernan (Beaumont Hospital): Behavioural Economics and Sepsis: Towards Hospital Trials
155pm: Karl Purcell (SEAI): Behavioural Economics and Energy Efficiency: Update on SEAI Behavioural Economics Team
205pm: Keith Walsh (Revenue Commissioners): Behavioural Economics and Revenue Behavioural Trials
215pm: Yvonne McCarthy (Central Bank): Behavioural Economics and Financial Regulation
225pm to 255pm: Roundtable discussion with Cass Sunstein about advancing this area in Irish Public Policy
2. The second talk will place from 3pm to 4pm and will outline the ideas from his recently released book "Republic". The sign-up page for this event is available here. A summary of the book is below. The venue is the Clinton Auditorium in UCD.
As the Internet grows more sophisticated, it is creating new threats to democracy. Social media companies such as Facebook can sort us ever more efficiently into groups of the like-minded, creating echo chambers that amplify our views. It's no accident that on some occasions, people of different political views cannot even understand each other. It's also no surprise that terrorist groups have been able to exploit social media to deadly effect. Welcome to the age of #Republic. In this revealing book, Cass Sunstein, the New York Times bestselling author of Nudge and The World According to Star Wars, shows how today's Internet is driving political fragmentation, polarization, and even extremism—and what can be done about it. Thoroughly rethinking the critical relationship between democracy and the Internet, Sunstein describes how the online world creates "cybercascades," exploits "confirmation bias," and assists "polarization entrepreneurs." And he explains why online fragmentation endangers the shared conversations, experiences, and understandings that are the lifeblood of democracy. In response, Sunstein proposes practical and legal changes to make the Internet friendlier to democratic deliberation. These changes would get us out of our information cocoons by increasing the frequency of unchosen, unplanned encounters and exposing us to people, places, things, and ideas that we would never have picked for our Twitter feed.
3. The third talk will place from 4pm to 5pm and will involve the presentation of the Ulysses medal to both Professor Sunstein and former US ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power. The sign-up page for this event is available here.
Event Description
Former US ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, and renowned Behavioural Economist, Professor Cass R. Sunstein, will receive the UCD Ulysses Medal - the highest honour the University can bestow - on Friday, 10 November in UCD O'Brien Centre for Science. Following the Ulysses Medal Presentation Ceremony, Former Ambassador Power and Professor Sunstein will take part in a moderated Q+A on the topics of US foreign policy and on Professor Sunstein's recently released book on impeachment (details here).
The schedule for the event is as follows:
4pm Citation and Award to Ambassador Power (10 mins)
4.10pm Citation and Award to Professor Sunstein (10 mins)
4.20pm moderated Q&A with Amb. Power & Prof. Sunstein on U.S. foreign policy and impeachment (40 mins)
5.00pm Q&A with the audience (20 mins)
5.20pm Refreshments
UCD Ulysses Medal
The UCD Ulysses Medal is the highest honour that University College Dublin can bestow. It was inaugurated in 2005, as part of the University’s sesquicentennial celebrations, to highlight the ‘creative brilliance’ of UCD alumnus James Joyce. It is awarded to individuals whose work has made an outstanding global contribution.
About Cass Sunstein
Cass R. Sunstein is currently the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. Mr. Sunstein has testified before congressional committees on many subjects, and he has been involved in constitution-making and law reform activities in a number of nations.
Mr. Sunstein is author of many articles and books, including Republic.com (2001), Risk and Reason (2002), Why Societies Need Dissent (2003), The Second Bill of Rights (2004), Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle (2005), Worst-Case Scenarios (2001), Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (with Richard H. Thaler, 2008), Simpler: The Future of Government (2013) and Why Nudge? (2014) and Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas (2014). He is now working on group decisionmaking and various projects on the idea of liberty.
About Former Ambassador Samantha Power
Ambassador Samantha Power is the Anna Lindh Professor of the Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and Professor of Practice at Harvard Law School. From 2013 to 2017 Power served as the 28th U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, as well as a member of President Obama’s cabinet. In this role, Power became the public face of U.S. opposition to Russian aggression in Ukraine and Syria, negotiated the toughest sanctions in a generation against North Korea, lobbied to secure the release of political prisoners, helped build new international law to cripple ISIL’s financial networks, and supported President Obama’s pathbreaking actions to end the Ebola crisis.From 2009 to 2013, Power served on the National Security Council as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights, where she focused on issues including atrocity prevention; UN reform; LGBT and women’s rights; the protection of religious minorities; and the prevention of human trafficking. Before joining the U.S. government, Power was the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School. Power’s book, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Power is also author of the New York Times bestseller Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (2008) and the editor, with Derek Chollet, of The Unquiet American: Richard Holbrooke in the World (2011). She began her career as a journalist, reporting from places such as Bosnia, East Timor, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan, and Zimbabwe and has twice been named to Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” list. Power earned a B.A. from Yale University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.
See below for our opening session on November 10th. This is by invitation only but if you are working on this area in Ireland and would like to come, send us an email at geary@ucd.ie The sign-up pages for Professor Sunstein's public talks are available here
Venue: UCD Geary Institute Seminar Room
130pm: Introduction and Welcome
135pm: Pete Lunn (ESRI): ESRI Research on Behavioural Economics
145pm: Fiona Kiernan (Beaumont Hospital): Behavioural Economics and Sepsis: Towards Hospital Trials
155pm: Karl Purcell (SEAI): Behavioural Economics and Energy Efficiency: Update on SEAI Behavioural Economics Team
205pm: Keith Walsh (Revenue Commissioners): Behavioural Economics and Revenue Behavioural Trials
215pm: Yvonne McCarthy (Central Bank): Behavioural Economics and Financial Regulation
225pm to 255pm: Roundtable discussion with Cass Sunstein about advancing this area in Irish Public Policy
For the first time, we will also host an early career conference the day before aimed at PhD students and early stage researchers in other agencies. Details of that event are available here. Attendees registered for the December 1st event are also welcome to attend the PhD session and registration is not necessary.
Please sign up for the 10th Annual Irish Economics, Psychology, and Policy Conference here.
Preliminary Programme:
9am to 9:15am: Coffee and Welcome 9:15am to 10:45am: Session 1
Michael Daly (UCD & Stirling): "Time perspective, decision-making, and longevity".
Maureen Maloney (NUIG): "Evaluating the framing effects of written pension communications: case study evidence" (with A. McCarthy).
Till Weber (UCD): “A Cross-Societal Comparison of Cooperative Dispositions and Norm Enforcement”.
10:45 to 11am: Coffee 11am to 12pm: Session 2
Pete Lunn (ESRI): "Many Years From Now: Measuring Misperception and Misunderstanding of Pensions".
Leonhard Lades (EnvEcon & UCD): "Self-Control in Everyday Life".
12pm to 1pm: Keynote 1
Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington (LSE): "Decision-making up against the wall: How socioeconomic status shapes basic psychological processes".
1pm to 1:45pm: Lunch
1:45pm to 3:15pm: Session 3
Dave Comerford (Stirling): "Animal Spirits and Political Animals: The Affect Heuristic Explains Partisan Differences in Investor Behavior".
Áine Ní Choisdealbha (ESRI): "Effects of efficiency information and emissions charges on consumer car preferences”.
Robert Murphy (Stirling and Department of Health): "Does informing members of the general population of the impact of aspects of health on patients’ life satisfaction and day affect change their judgements of health?".
3:15pm to 3:45pm: Coffee
4pm to 5pm: Keynote 2
Don Ross (UCC): "Do People Bundle Sequences of Choices? An Experimental Investigation".
Congratulations to Professor Richard Thaler who was announced as the winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics yesterday. Linked here is a piece I wrote for the Sunday Business Post on his contribution to Economics (pre-edited text and some more links below).
Richard Thaler, 2017 Nobel Laureate in Economics
Richard Thaler was recently named as the 2017 Nobel laureate in Economics. Thaler is responsible for a shift in mainstream economics towards more psychological realism in modelling consumer and investor behaviour. He has spent the bulk of his career at the University of Chicago and is seen as the leading figure in the discipline known as behavioural economics.
Thaler's ideas are relevant to many areas of public policy in Ireland, in particular pensions. Along with his colleague Benartzi, Thaler designed and evaluated a pension participation scheme called Save More Tomorrow, where people sign up to a pension that starts with zero contributions and then progressively increases along with their salary increases. This type of "auto-escalation" is based on two key human decision making factors studied by Thaler - loss aversion whereby people do not want to part with income they have grown accustomed to, and myopia whereby present losses are felt to a far greater extent than future losses. Save More Tomorrow turns these biases on their head and has proven a remarkable way of countering many of the human factors that lead people to under-save.
Thaler has also written a great deal about how decision biases leave people open to influence from marketing techniques, and the implications of this work is at the core of a lot of modern regulatory debate. With this in mind, along with Cass Sunstein, Thaler has sought to develop the policy, legal, and regulatory implications of behavioural economics. Their popular book Nudge advocates a widespread reform of policy and regulation around principles of using psychologically-informed interventions to "unstick" markets and enable people to make more empowered decisions. The ideas in this book have led to agencies being formed throughout the world, most notably the UK Behavioural Insights team that was established in the Cabinet Office during the Conservative and LibDem coalition administration. As well as niche teams like this, the work has also had an increasing influence on regulation, in particular in light of the financial crisis, and has also come to be more influential in the design of policies across areas such as health, education, and development.
There are several ways that the ideas coming from Thaler and colleagues' work could potentially improve policy in Ireland, including making pension policy more robust to low levels of active decision making, substantially simplifying compliance with administrative requirements, protecting consumers more from exploitative marketing, putting in place safeguards in investment organisations to guard against herding and related biases, and many other policy initiatives. Agencies such as DPER, Department of Finance, Revenue Commissioners, and the Central Bank have published work on this area in the last number of years. The ESRI Pricelab led by Pete Lunn has conducted a wide range of studies on the implications of behavioural economics for regulation. The potential introduction of pension autoenrolment in Ireland comes directly from the behavioural literature and most regulators and government departments are developing capacities to apply behavioural evidence.
Thaler's work on policy is based around a number of core academic ideas. His most famous early papers examined phenomena such as mental accounting, whereby people partition their budgets into separate psychological pockets, something that affects their behaviour in many different ways. For example, people tend to be more likely to spend windfall amounts on luxuries, something that is intuitive psychologically but not accounted for in standard models. One of his most cited early papers also looked at the implications of limited self-control for consumer decision making, including the extent to which people might prefer to "tie their hands" to overcome the tendency to be present-biased.
His collaboration with the previous Nobel winner Daniel Kahneman built on previous Nobel-winning work by Kahneman and Tverksy and sought to understand how people evaluate gains and losses differently. This research has generally shown that people value losses to a far greater extent, something that has substantial implications for investment and consumption. The related idea of an endowment effect, namely that people tend to place more value on things they already own rather than gains they could make by speculating, has been used to explain phenomena such as low levels of switching in consumer markets and the tendency for well-being to be more influenced by income decreases than by income increases.
Throughout the 1990s, Thaler was at the vanguard of a group of scholars that sought to broaden the psychological foundations of economics, away from the dominant models of rational choice. He was by no means the first to do this. Indeed, previous Nobel winners include Amartya Sen, Herbert Simon, Maurice Allais, and Kahneman himself, all of whom pushed back against the assumptions of rationality and self-interested behaviour inherent in textbook economic models. However, it is clear that nobody was more successful than Thaler in gaining acceptance of psychologically-informed models across many areas of economics. As well as those mentioned above, his contributions stretch across many areas of economics and finance including studies examining why stock markets tend to overreact to news, how fairness acts as a constraint on choice and markets, and how pension decisions are made.
In terms of learning more about his ideas and why they are important for policy and business, Thaler's recent book Misbehaving is an accessible and personal account of his role in the development of behavioural economics. Nudge, referred to above, describes his and Sunstein's ideas for applying behavioural research to real-world problems of policy and business. While already a popular set of ideas, the award of the Nobel to Thaler is likely to substantially further accelerate the degree of interest in applications in this area internationally.
Liam Delaney is Professor of Economics at UCD and directs the MSc programme in Behavioural Economics.
Links:
This blogpost by Tyler Cowen on Marginal Revolution contains many useful links to Thaler's work and why he was awarded the prize.
Students in our undergraduate and postgraduate behavioural economics modules will already have encountered Thaler's work in a number of places, and will come across it more later in the semester as we examine behavioural law and regulation.
Thaler's major collaborator on law, regulation, and public policy, Cass Sunstein, will speak here in Dublin on November 10th - details here.
The UCD Geary Institute for Public Policy is pleased to announce our PhD Student Conference in Behavioural Science for 2017 in collaboration with the Stirling University Management School. This continues two successful annual events held at Stirling. For information about last year's PhD conference click here. The PhD conference will be held at University College Dublin on November 30th and will be followed by the 10th annual Irish economics and psychology conference on December 1st. Attendees to the PhD conference on November 30th are also welcome to attend the December 1 workshop. Please sign up separately for the workshop. Our keynote speakers will be Professor Don Ross (UCC) and Professor Jennifer Sheehy Skeffington (LSE).
Day Schedule (Thursday, November 30, 2017)
09:00-09:15: Registration
09:15-10:00: Welcome & Introductory Talk by Prof Liam Delaney
10:00-10:30: Coffee Break
10:30-11:30: Session 1
Session 1a: The environment
1. Victoria Taranu (Hasselt University) on "Experimental study on alternative information framings of the flemish energy performance certificate" (with Griet Verbeeck).
2. Vlada Pleshcheva (Humboldt University Berlin) on "Do consumers value qualitatively identical improvements in fuel consumption and CO2 emissions of cars equally?"
Session 1b: Media use
3. Veelaiporn Promwichit (University of Edinburgh) on "Can social media sentiment predict futures returns?" (with Arman Eshraghi and Ronan Gallagher).
4. Kevin Momanyi (University of Aberdeen) on "An econometric analysis of the impact of telecare" (with Paul McNamee and Diane Skatun).
11:30-12:00: Coffee Break
12:00-13:00: Session 2
Session 2a: Locus of control
5. Juliane Hennecke (Free University Berlin) on "Controlled by politics? - Economic situation, locus of control and political participation".
6. Malte Preuss (Free University Berlin) on "Biased by success and failure: How unemployment shapes stated locus of control" (with Juliane Hennecke).
Session 2b: Decision Making 1
7. Luis Enrique Loria (University of Aberdeen) on "Current experience matters: Evidence from a reference dependent Discrete Choice Experiment design" (with Verity Watson, Takahiko Kiso, and Euan Phimister).
8. Mishal Ahmed (Georgia Institute of Technology) on "Quality provision with salient thinkers".
13:00-14:00: Lunch Break
14:00-15:30: Session 3
Session 3a: Mental Health and Work
9. Klavs Ciprikis (Dublin Institute of Technology) on "The impact of mental disorders on wages in the United Kingdom: An empirical analysis".
10. Kate Isherwood (Bangor University) on “Looking forwards to work: Motivational and cognitive interventions to promote wellbeing, productivity and economic activity in the workforce.” (with John Parkinson, Gareth Harvey, and Andrew Goodman).
Session 3b: Decision Making 2
11. Féidhlim McGowan (ESRI) on "Representation or reproduction? Lay understanding of probability distributions and willingness to take bets" (with Pete Lunn).
12. Terry McElvaney (ESRI) on “Complexity in car finance: Assessing limitations in consumer comprehension of personal contract plans (with Pete Lunn and Féidhlim McGowan).
15:30-16:00: Coffee Break
16:00-17:00: Session 4
Session 4a: Education
13. Emmanuel Igwe (Greenwich University) on “A study on attitudes into postgraduate education” (with Gabriella Cagliesi and Denise Hawkes).
14. Kenneth Devine (Central Bank of Ireland) on "Risky Business: New Insights into Mortgage Choice and Risk Preferences".
Session 4b: Subjective Well-Being
15. Caroline Wehner (Maastricht University and IZA) on "Personality and educational achievement: The role of emotional stability and conscientiousness" (with Trudie Schils).
16. Rhi Willmot (Bangor University) on “The Role of Positive Psychology in Physical Wellbeing” (with John Parkinson).
For questions, please contact Liam Delaney (liam.delaney@ucd.ie) or Leonhard Lades (leonhard.lades@ucd.ie)
Professor Till Grüne-Yanoff will deliver a public lecture to the Irish Behavioural Science and Policy Network on Wednesday 18th October at 6pm. There will be a wide-ranging Q+A session following the talk which will conclude at 7.30pm. The venue is the Royal Irish Academy. He will speak on behavioural economics and public policy, in particular on the role of policy in "boosting" ability to make good decisions under a variety of circumstances. The webpage to register for the event is available here.
Nudging and Boosting: Steering or Empowering Good Decisions
Ralph Hertwig and Till Grüne-Yanoff
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin and Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm
Abstract
In recent years, policy makers worldwide have begun to acknowledge the potential value of insights from psychology and behavioral economics into how people make decisions. These insights can inform the design of nonregulatory and nonmonetary policy interventions—as well as more traditional fiscal and coercive measures. To date, much of the discussion of behaviorally informed approaches has emphasized “nudges,” that is, interventions designed to steer people in a particular direction while preserving their freedom of choice. Yet behavioral science also provides support for a distinct kind of nonfiscal and noncoercive intervention, namely, “boosts.” The objective of boosts is to foster people’s competence to make their own choices—that is, to exercise their own agency. Building on this distinction, we further elaborate on how boosts are conceptually distinct from nudges: The two kinds of interventions differ with respect to (a) their immediate intervention targets, (b) their roots in different research programs, (c) the causal pathways through which they affect behavior, (d) their assumptions about human cognitive architecture, (e) the reversibility of their effects, (f) their programmatic ambitions, and (g) their normative implications. We discuss each of these dimensions, provide an initial taxonomy of boosts, and address some possible misconceptions.
Biography:
Till Grüne-Yanoff is professor of philosophy at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm.
His research focuses on the philosophy of science and on decision theory. In particular, he investigates the practice of modelling in science and engineering, develops formal models of preference consistency and preference change and discusses the evaluation of evidence in policy decision making. Click here for his Google Scholar page.
Till is editor of the journal Economics & Philosophy. He is also a member of the TINT Finnish Centre of Excellence in the Philosophy of Social Science in Helsinki, and a regular guest researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Human Development.
He lives with his wife and his two children in the beautiful Vasastan neighborhood of Stockholm.
Delighted to welcome four new members of the research team. We will shortly advertise some more posts.
Welcome to Till Weber who joins us, having just submitted his PhD at Nottingham. Till will work with us for at least the next two years, including lecturing on the new MSc. His webpage is below and he will present an overview of his experimental research at a later session. https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/economics/people/till.weber
Welcome also to Leonhard Lades who joins EnvEcon and Geary for two years from the University of Stirling. Leo will also give some lectures on the MSc. He has published a number of papers on intertemporal choice, consumption, ethical aspects of nudging, and a variety of other topics. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=3SQTAFQAAAAJ&hl=en
While he has been here a while on another project, I am also glad to formally welcome Michael Daly, also from Stirling, who starts his 2 year Marie Skłodowska Curie fellowship here in the next couple of weeks. Michael is Associate Professor at Stirling and has published extensively in economic psychology, health psychology, behavioural change and cognate areas. https://www.michaeldalyresearch.com/
Tadgh Hegarty has also started with us, and will conduct a PhD at the intersection of behavioural economics and machine learning, examining the nature and extent of behavioural biases in gambling decisions.
The deadline for these scholarships is November 1st. We are certainly open to speaking to MSc students interested in applying for PhD funding to conduct research in our research group. Full details are available here They are open to EU nationals living outside of Ireland and other resident categories set out in their terms and conditions to apply to take their PhD in an Irish university.
Professor Glenn Harrison comes to Dublin on October 13th and will give a public lecture on Behavioral Welfare Economics. Professor Harrison is one of the leading researchers in econometrics and experimental economics. I can also say from experience that he is an engaging speaker with a wide range of intellectual interests. He has agreed to give a talk that will be accessible to a broad audience interested in behavioural economics. His bio is below and website is here. The talk will take place from 1230pm to 2pm at the Institute of Banking Building near the IFSC. There is no charge for registering but we ask people to register in advance on this link as space is limited and the building is secured.
Glenn Harrison is the C.V. Starr Chair of Risk Management & Insurance and director of the Center for the Economic Analysis of Risk (CEAR) in the Department of Risk Management & Insurance, J. Mack Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University. He has more than 185 academic publications, including general journals such as Econometrica, American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Economic Journal, Journal of the American Statistical Association, and American Journal of Public Health, and specialist journals such as Journal of Environmental Economics & Management, Land Economics, Natural Resources Journal, Journal of Law & Economics, Experimental Economics, and Economics & Philosophy. His research interests include experimental economics, law and economics, international trade policy and environmental policy.
His work in experimental economics has included the study of bidding behavior in auctions, market contestability and regulation, bargaining behavior, and the elicitation of risk and time preferences. Most recently it has examined the complementarity of laboratory and field experiments. His work in law and economics has centered on the calculation of compensatory damages in tobacco litigation, including testifying for plaintiffs in the Medicaid litigation that resulted in a settlement worth more than $200 billion. Most recently he has worked on the relationship between compensatory and punitive damages, and class actions involving the excessive promotion of certain drugs. His work in international trade policy has employed computable general equilibrium models to quantify the effects of unilateral, regional and multilateral trade reforms. A particular focus of this policy analysis has been to assess the effects of trade reform on poor households in developing countries. His work in environ mental economics has included modeling the effects of alternative policies to mitigate global warming, critiques of casual applications of the contingent valuation method, and improved methods of damage assessment. Most recently he has focused on the formal characterization of environmental reform as a “policy lottery” that properly reflects uncertainty in predicted effects on households.
Professor Harrison has been a consultant for numerous government agencies and private bodies. These include the World Bank (evaluating trade policy reforms for developing countries), the Swedish government and the United States Environmental Protection Agency (evaluating carbon tax proposals), the Danish government (evaluating tax and deregulation policies), and counsel representing parties suing tobacco companies and drug companies for economic damages. Professor Harrison is a Pisces, and loves red wine, one Swedish woman, and one American daughter. Before academic life, Professor Harrison played Australian “no-rules” football for Hawthorn in the Australian Football League, kicking one goal in his career.
From 2001 to 2013, we held eleven workshops in Ireland for postgraduate and early career researchers. They started as exclusively aimed at Irish-based researchers and eventually morphed into international events. The events were run mostly by PhD students in the Universities, including events hosted by UCD, TCD, Limerick, Cork, and Galway. In Scotland, 8 universities combine on PhD training and host an annual event for PhD students. Such events provide students and researchers an opportunity to discuss their work outside their own institution and meet other researchers and faculty.
To restart this effort, we will host a full-day event in Dublin on January 19th. The event is aimed at PhD students and early career researchers across the Irish universities. A full call for papers with details of submissions will be released soon. The event will take the form of thematic sessions with ideally at least some faculty discussant input at each session, along with keynote talks, and engagement with policy and industry. We welcome submissions from PhD students and early career researchers in institutions on the island of Ireland.
I would welcome suggestions from students, researchers, and faculty about how to make this a feature of the Irish research environment. Some questions include whether it should be a student-run event in future years, links to the Irish Economics Association, venues, format of sessions, whether it should be restricted to national institutions, whether there should be job-market aspects etc., I hope revamping these sessions will also create an opportunity to discuss collaboration on advanced training in Economics across the country.
Below is the submitted text of an article I wrote for the Sunday Business Post - link to the final slightly tidier article behind a pay wall here. There have been several recent articles particularly in the US context questioning the efficacy of corporate well-being programmes (e.g. here and here with thanks to Brendan Kennelly for suggestions). RAND Europe recently produced a report looking at how various programmes were being implemented in the UK, pointing to a relatively positive view of how they are received by workers but also pointing to the dearth of any effectiveness evidence. In Ireland, the main employers group IBEC have launched a new initiative to promote well-being in the workplace - the Keepwell Mark. I spoke at their launch that also included speakers from companies such as Microsoft Ireland and was attended by hundreds of company representatives. The seeming failure of the tested initiatives in the US to convert into improvements in company productivity and the extent to which many of the initiatives in the US even seem to have backfired and in cases reduced employee morale (e.g compulsory drug testing initiatives reducing trust) should give us pause in the Irish context. Should IBEC be successful in bringing many of the country's employers on board such an initiative, it would provide the opportunity for a serious and structured way of evaluating the impact of various features of well-being initiatives and hopefully the potential to avoid rolling out ones that are going to have harmful effects to both productivity and morale, and ultimately to develop an evidence base on the extent to which well-designed initiatives could have potential benefits and the extent of these benefits.
The declines in infant mortality in Ireland in the 1950s still represent one of the state's major achievements. Improvements in sanitation, in particular, led to healthier maternal, infant, and childhood conditions, setting the foundation both for reducing mortality and improving the health of people as they grew up. At least some of the health improvements we are seeing in our aging populations can be traced to this period. Furthermore, while people have spoken about our health system as being a "black hole", the improvements in life expectancy in the last 30 years have been remarkable, fuelled in part by reductions in smoking and improved nutrition but also by health services, however still flawed, that have substantially improved with the investments made in them by successive governments.
There is increasing evidence for the interplay between health and economic productivity. As might be expected, economists disagree on the precise relationships, but an increasing body of work has related health to economic productivity at both individual and national levels. In the context of aging populations, it seems obvious that improving health will act at least partly as a bulwark against rising dependency ratios, allowing people to work healthily longer into life. One key element of this is the extent to which mental health and chronic pain influence economic outcomes. Depression and chronic pain have dramatic effects on probabilities of unemployment, lost days at work, and life-time wealth accumulation. Mental health might well be the biggest economic concern for the Irish economy in terms of the scope and severity of the effects. Scholars such as Richard Layard have called for major and transformative levels of investments in mental health across countries to understand conditions more and develop and scale-up effective treatments. More broadly, developing workplaces and health services that break the link between mental health and economic deprivation is one of the major tasks of the 21st century.
As well as the implications for economic productivity, there has been an increasing emphasis on how to incorporate health and well-being into policy making as a goal and indicator of progress. A range of high-level reports have asked about how to construct measures that go beyond GDP and economic measures. The incorporation of factors such as literacy, life expectancy, economic inequality and other measures of welfare provides a more rounded account of the progress of nations and has a long history. More recently, the incorporation of measures of subjective welfare and of mental health has become the focus of attention.
The development of workplace programmes to improve health and well-being should be seen in this context, both in relation to their potential role in productivity and as contributing to well-being as an end in itself. So far, such programmes are in their relative infancy. The evidence on the links between well-being and work is very strong but that is different to saying we know how to influence those links. The internet is replete with examples of over-claims about the benefits of introducing health and well-being programmes in work settings. So far, the evidence is slight that productivity can be directly improved by such programmes. There are certainly many studies showing that employees will engage with many of them and enjoy aspects of them etc., But whether investment in worker health and well-being driven by programmatic activity of firms can be part of a major societal shift in well-being and productivity is still an open question.
There are clearly many plausible reasons why providing access to healthier food at work, exercise facilities, health screening, and related services might impact on both well-being and productivity. But there are also pitfalls. Such facilities might only be used by people who are already doing fine in terms of health and well-being. Framed badly, corporate well-being programmes might come across as intrusive or patronising, an attempt to distract from wider issues, or even a subtle hint that worker dissatisfaction is due to their own fitness or mental health issues. Encouraging people to disclose mental health issues to their employer often ignores the fact that many companies have very little idea what to do with such a disclosure and there are risks that people could end up being tacitly discriminated against. Recent reviews of the literature make it clear that there are not simple off-the-shelf models for intervening in worker well-being that will also raise productivity. If this is to be achieved, it will require iteration and commitment to testing, and a willingness to measure and acknowledge failure.
Even with all the above in mind, accumulating evidence on work-place programmes that genuinely have a causal impact on worker well-being and productivity would be a substantial advance for both business and policy in Ireland. Adopting a hard-headed approach to evaluating these programmes will be key.
Liam Delaney is Professor of Economics at UCD and directs the MSc in Behavioural Economics.
