Books

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Behavioral and Experimental Economics

  • Gabriel Burdin, Simon D. Halliday and Fabio Landini, 2018, “The hidden benefits of abstaining from control”, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Vol. 147, March, 2018. We propose an extension of Falk and Kosfeld’s (AER, 2006) experimental design to illuminate the role of autonomy in explaining how individuals react to control in a principal-agent relationship. We add a third party who exerts control over the agent and find that control-aversion ceases to exist. A draft of the paper is available as IZA discussion paper 9251. Preprint available here.

  • Simon D. Halliday and Jonathan Lafky, 2019, “Reciprocity via Ratings: An experimental study of bias in evaluations”, The Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics. Vol 189. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socec.2019.101480, Available at: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1ZyEv7tbfGilCx Our study examines how evaluations of objective ability can be influenced by generous or selfish behavior on the part of the person being evaluated. We allow subjects in a laboratory setting to rate (costly or free) a seller of a good and send the rating to a potential buyer. We find that seller quality is not significant and the main driver of rating behavior is the side payment sellers can make to raters.

Development and Environmental

Economics Education

  • Simon D. Halliday, 2019, “Data Literacy in Economic Development,” The Journal of Economic Education, 50:3, 284-298, DOI: 10.1080/00220485.2019.1618762. Based on teaching Economic Development (ECO211) at Smith College, I have developed a series of exercises to model the data analysis that a student would use in analyzing a household survey (the South African National Income Dynamics Study) with either MS Excel or Google Spreadsheets. I report on these in the paper and presented the draft at the CTREE 2016 and LAC-DEV 2016 conferences. See the companion site to the article here: http://simondhalliday.com/data_literacy_in_economic_development/. Preprint available here.
  • Simon D. Halliday, 2019, “Promoting an Ethical Economics Classroom Through Partnership”, 2019, International Journal for Students as Partners, Vol 3 (1), 182-189. I reflect on having a student as a partner in teaching and learning in an introductory statistics and econometrics class at Smith College. I argue that instructors enter their classes with an ethical vision and that partnership, independent of improving pedagogy, can ensure that instructors are better able to adhere to and maintain the practices required to uphold their ethical vision. I explain how my partner and I used guiding principles informed by my ethical vision to refine my pedagogical practice.
  • Thomas Dvorak, Simon D. Halliday, Michael O’Hara, and Aaron Swoboda, 2019, “Efficient Empiricism: Streamlining teaching, research, and learning in empirical courses”, The Journal of Economic Education, 50:3, 242-257, DOI: 10.1080/00220485.2019.1618765 Each of the authors were TIER faculty fellows: Dvorak and O’Hara were 2015-16 fellows and Swoboda was a 2016-17 fellow (see here). See the companion site here: simondhalliday.com/efficient_empiricism. Preprint available here.

Accepted and Forthcoming

  • D. Girardi, S. Mamunuru, S. D. Halliday, and S. Bowles, “Does studying economics make you selfish?,”” 2021, Forthcoming, Southern Economic Journal, UMass Amherst Economics Department Working Paper 2021-07. Available as a pre-print at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/econ_workingpaper/304/.

Revisions Requested

  • NA at the moment.

Under Review

  • S. D. Halliday, C. Makler, D. McKee, and A. Papadopoulou, “Improving student comprehension through interactive model visualization,” 2023, Under Review at the International Review of Economics Education.

Chapters in Books

  • S. D. Halliday and E. C. Marshall, “Where is the “behavioral”” in introductory microeconomics?”” In Teaching Principles of Microeconomics, M. Maier and P. Ruder, Eds., Edward Elgar, 2023, ch. 7.
  • Simon D. Halliday, 2015, “Global Public Goods” published in Running the Economy, Santos et al (eds). Open University Press. My chapter covers game theory, global commons, and collective action.

Forthcoming

  • S. D. Halliday and J. E. Tierney, “Revolutionizing teaching economics online with artificial intelligence,”” in Teaching Economics Online, A. al Bahrani and P. Chaudhury, Eds., Edward Elgar, forthcoming (2024), ch. 3.

Being Edited or Revised for Submission

  • “What do we think an economics student should know? A machine learning investigation of research and intermediate-level texts” with Samuel Bowles, Wendy Carlin and Sahana Subramanyam. We explore what machine learning textual analysis can tell us about how the content of the texts for intermediate microeconomics and macroeconomics courses has reflected changes in economic research and in the economy. Topic modeling applied to the corpus of 27 thousand papers in top research journals in the past century allows us to map the content of the textbooks against the evolution of published research. Under Review. Draft available here.
  • “Lies, Labor and Luck” with Oumayma Koulouh ‘19. We study the differences in lying behavior between real-effort and luck tasks. We conduct an experiment with a 2 by 2 factorial design in which we observe lying behavior at the individual level. Presented at LACBEE 2019. Editing for Review. Paper draft available here.
  • “Teaching Social Preferences”, Despite advances in evidence and theory, few examples exist for teaching social preferences in undergraduate microeconomics courses. In this paper I address the gap in the literature by proposing four models in which such preferences can be taught in an undergraduate microeconomics course that use graphical analysis and algebra to teach constrained optimization, externalities, and exchange. Presented at CTREE, 2019.

Working Papers

  • “Honesty at the Margin: Experiments on the Dynamics of Deception” joint with Jonathan Lafky and Alistair Wilson. Our paper examines the evolution of dishonesty over time. In particular, we focus on the following question: In market activities where dishonesty is rewarded, does others’ dishonesty crowd out honest participants, or instead do initially honest types evolve to become more dishonest? Our paper responds to a large experimental literature rooted in the Fischbacher and Föllmi-Heusi (2013) framework, which has shown a robust preference for honest dealings. However, this research is focused on static settings, examining short-run behavior. Our project instead uses the same die-rolling paradigm to examine questions about long-run behavior. In an environment with both an extensive-margin decision on whether to engage, and an intensive-margin decision over whether to act dishonestly, our project measures which margin is most important for selection, and whether preferences for honesty are robust to long-run forces.

Work in Progress

  • Gabriel Burdin, Fabio Landini and I are developing experiments on delegation and power related to our previous paper.

Policy

  • Report to the Department of Land Affairs, South Africa: With Malcolm Keswell, Susan Godlonton, and Tim Brophy. The report summarized our work and preliminary results from the Quality of Life Survey.

Orphaned Working Papers

  • “The Effects of Major-Job Mismatch on Early Career Earnings and Job Satisfaction,” with Roger Kaufman and Louise Yu. We use the U.S. Department of Education’s Baccalaureate and Beyond restricted survey data to estimate the determinants of major-job mismatch and its effects on post-graduate earnings and job satisfaction. After controlling for ability, we find that graduates who chose undergraduate majors that provided substantial occupational and job-specific training are more likely to work in jobs that are closely related to their majors one and four years after graduation and have higher earnings and greater job satisfaction. Orphaned for now. Draft available here.
  • “Risk-Taking in the Classroom:” Co-authored with Justine Burns and Malcolm Keswell ( University of Cape Town), this paper is based on an experiment with intermediate microeconomics students at the University of Cape Town where we varied the number of negative points a student could receive for an incorrect answer to assess attitudes to risk. Available as SALDRU Working Paper 87. Orphaned for now.
  • “Don’t Take What Isn’t Yours: Giving, Taking and Punishment:” The paper is based on experiments I did at the University of Cape Town. An early version of the paper is in the Economic Research South Africa working paper series as Working Paper 211. Orphaned for now. People punish taking more than they do non-generosity.