Related papers: Using Causal Inference to Explore Government Polic…
During COVID-19, draconian countermeasures forbidding non-essential human activities have been adopted worldwide, providing an unprecedented setup for testing sustainability policies. We unravel causal relationships among 16 environmental…
The choices that researchers make while conducting a statistical analysis usually have a notable impact on the results. This fact has become evident in the ongoing research of the association between the environment and the evolution of the…
Even though laboratory and epidemiological studies have demonstrated the effects of ambient temperature on the transmission and survival of coronaviruses, not much has been done on the effects of weather on the spread of COVID-19. This…
We propose a novel approach to assess the public's coping behavior during the COVID-19 outbreak by examining the emotions. Specifically, we explore (1) changes in the public's emotions with the COVID-19 crisis progression and (2) the…
How political beliefs change in accordance with media exposure is a complicated matter. Some studies have been able to demonstrate that groups with different media diets in the aggregate (e.g., U.S. media consumers ingesting partisan news)…
Public policy must confront emergencies that evolve in real time and in uncertain directions, yet little is known about the nature of policy response. Here we take the coronavirus pandemic as a global and extraordinarily consequential case,…
How information consumption affects behaviour is an open and widely debated research question. A popular hypothesis states that the so-called infodemic has a substantial impact on orienting individual decisions. A competing hypothesis…
This study employs the Causal Machine Learning (CausalML) statistical method to analyze the influence of electricity pricing policies on carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the household sector. Investigating the causality between potential…
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) global pandemic has led many countries to impose unprecedented lockdown measures in order to slow down the outbreak. Questions on whether governments have acted promptly enough, and whether lockdown…
We examine the household-specific effects of the introduction of Time-of-Use (TOU) electricity pricing schemes. Using a causal forest (Athey and Imbens, 2016; Wager and Athey, 2018; Athey et al., 2019), we consider the association between…
Randomized experiments (A/B testings) have become the standard way for web-facing companies to guide innovation, evaluate new products, and prioritize ideas. There are times, however, when running an experiment is too complicated (e.g., we…
Does the choice of programming language affect energy consumption? Previous highly visible studies have established associations between certain programming languages and energy consumption. A causal misinterpretation of this work has led…
A contact-tracing strategy has been deemed necessary to contain the spread of COVID-19 following the relaxation of lockdown measures. Using an agent-based model, we explore one of the technology-based strategies proposed, a contact-tracing…
The increasing polarization in democratic societies is an emergent outcome of political opinion dynamics. Yet, the fundamental mechanisms behind the formation of political opinions, from individual beliefs to collective consensus, remain…
This paper studies whether and how differently projected information about the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic affects individuals' prosocial behavior and expectations on future outcomes. We conducted an online experiment with British…
The work-from-home policy affected people of all demographics and professions, including students and faculty at universities. After the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, institutions moved their operations online, affecting the…
The COVID-19 crisis is profoundly influencing the global economic framework due to restrictive measures adopted by governments worldwide. Finding real-time data to correctly quantify this impact is very significant but not as…
COVID-19 has disrupted society and changed how people learn, work and live. The availability of vaccines in the spring of 2021, however, led to a gradual return of many pre-pandemic activities in Massachusetts in the fall of 2021.…
This paper has the goal of evaluating how changes in mobility has affected the infection spread of Covid-19 throughout the 2020-2021 years. However, identifying a "clean" causal relation is not an easy task due to a high number of…
We construct a novel database containing hundreds of thousands geotagged messages related to the COVID-19 pandemic sent on Twitter. We create a daily index of social distancing -- at the state level -- to capture social distancing beliefs…