John A. List | |
---|---|
Born | John August List September 25, 1968 |
Education | University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point (BA) University of Wyoming (PhD) |
Spouse(s) | Dana L. Suskind (m. 2018) |
Academic career | |
Institution | University of Chicago |
Field | Economics |
School or tradition | Behavioral economics Experimental economics |
Doctoral advisor | Shelby Gerking |
Influences | Vernon Smith [1] Gary Becker [1] |
Information at IDEAS / RePEc |
John August List (born September 25, 1968) is an American economist known for his work in establishing field experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis. Since 2016, he has served as the Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, where he was Chairman of the Department of Economics from 2012 to 2018. [2] Since 2016, he has also served as Visiting Robert F. Hartsook Chair in Fundraising at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University. [3] In 2011, List was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2011, he was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society. [4] [5]
List is noted for his pioneering contributions to field experimentation in economics, with Nobel laureate economist George Akerlof and noted law professor Cass Sunstein writing that "List has done more than anyone else to advance the methods and practice of field experiments." [6] Nobel laureate economist Gary Becker quipped that "John List's work in field experiments is revolutionary." [7]
As detailed in his popular science book, The Why Axis (co-authored with Uri Gneezy), List uses field experiments to offer new insights in various areas of economics research, such as education, private provision of public goods, discrimination, social preferences, prospect theory, environmental economics, marketplace effects on corporate and government policy decisions, gender and inclusion, corporate social responsibility and auctions. The book became an international best-seller and represented List's field experiments from the early 1990s until 2010.
List published a second popular book, The Voltage Effect, in February, 2022, that has become a runaway best seller, making the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, Porchlight, Washington Post, and LA Times best seller lists. [7] The book is based on a collection of academic articles written by List on scaling. With a suite of coauthors, List has produced both theoretical and empirical insights concerning the "science of using science." [8] [9] [10] [11] In The Voltage Effect, List argues that scaling, at its roots, is an Anna Karenina problem, overturning the conventional wisdom that the problem is a "silver bullet" or "best shot" problem. This leads List to present a thesis that "Every scalable idea is the same, each unscalable idea is unscalable in its own way." List revealed his work at Colby College in 2021.
List received his bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, and his Ph.D. from the University of Wyoming in 1996. His first teaching position was at the University of Central Florida; he later moved to the University of Arizona and then to the University of Maryland, College Park (where he still holds an adjunct position), before moving to the University of Chicago. List also spends time at Tilburg University, where he is a distinguished visiting scholar, and at Resources for the Future, where he is a University Distinguished Scholar. From May 2002 to July 2003 he served on the Council of Economic Advisers as a senior economist. According to RePEc, List the top ranked economist worldwide of the 40,000 economists who graduated in the last 20 years, and as of August 2023, RePEc ranks him as the 5th most influential economist in the world. [12]
John attended Sun Prairie High School, graduating in 1987. He became an Academic All-American in golf at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point in 1990 and 1991, while majoring in economics, graduating in 1992. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wyoming in 1996 under supervision of Shelby Gerking. He began his career at the University of Central Florida as an assistant professor in 1996. He became an associate professor in 2000 at the University of Arizona where he worked with Vernon L. Smith on furthering his field experimental methods. In 2001 he was awarded a full professorship at the University of Maryland, College Park. He held that post until 2004, when he received an appointment as a full professor at the Economics Department of the University of Chicago. In January 2011, List was awarded an endowed professorship at the University of Chicago's Economics Department for his work in the area of field experiments.
In addition to his university career, List served as the first chief economist for taxi company Uber, and later for the similar company Lyft. [13] List became the first chief economist for the Walmart corporation in April 2022. [14]
In 2015, List was shortlisted for a Nobel Prize by Reuters (alongside Charles Manski and Richard Blundell). List and Blundell were subsequently odds on favorites to win in betting parlors, List for his work on field experiments and Blundell for his work in labor economics. At age 46, List was the youngest Reuters prediction by nearly 20 years. In April 2011 List was selected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2012, List was selected to receive the Yrjo Jahnsson Lecture Series prize, given by the Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation. The award, given every 2 years by the Finnish Foundation, recognized List's achievements to society from pioneering the use of field experiments. Ten of the previous nineteen recipients have gone on to win the Nobel Prize in economics. In August 2017, List was awarded the Klein Prize International Economic Review for his work on field experiments. Six of the twenty recipients have won the Nobel Prize. And, in 2022 List was given the Adam Smith Award, the National Association of Business Economists (NABE) most prestigious award. NABE cited List's pioneering contributions of showing the power of field experiments to answer key business questions and resolve scaling problems within firms.
In November 2014 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Tilburg University. Tilburg University calls him "a true pioneer in experimental field research," whose innovative work has "finally made it possible to test behavioral economic theory in everyday practice...He has raised this research area to a higher level with his originality, expertise, and impact, and he is an inspiration to many." In 2016, University of Ottawa bestowed the honorary doctorate to List for his pioneering work in field experiments. In 2011 List was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. [15] In 2015 he was elected Fellow of the Econometric Society. In 2015 [16] and 2016, [17] he was named to the Nonprofit Times Power & Influence Top 50. In 2017, he received the Hartsook Growing Philanthropy Award. [18]
In 2004, List received the 1st Place Competitive Paper Award for his field experiment titled “Informational Cascades: Evidence from a Field Experiment with Market Professionals.” The paper was picked as the top research study in 2004 within finance by the FMA, which considered hundreds of studies. List received the 2008 Arrow Senior Prize for his field experimental work in the area of testing economic theory from the BE Press. In July 2010, List was awarded the highest honor by the AAEA, the John Kenneth Galbraith prize. The award was given for recognition of List's "breakthrough discoveries in economics and outstanding contributions to humanity through leadership, research, and service. In particular, List's pathbreaking work using field experiments in economics."
His work focuses on microeconomic issues, and includes over 250 academic publications. [19] Among these articles are field experiments using several different markets to obtain data, including charitable fundraising activities, the Chicago Board of Trade, Costa Rican CEOs, the new automobile market, sports memorabilia markets, coin markets, auto repair markets, open air markets located everywhere—from the United States to Morocco to India, various venues on the internet, several auction settings, shopping malls, various labor markets, and grammar and high schools. In the past two decades, List has expanded his research agenda to explore theoretical and empirical aspects of scaling ideas and policies.
List's research on behavioral economics has focused on testing theories like gift exchange, social preferences, and prospect theory. Traditional tests of these theories relied on recruiting undergraduate students to participate in experiments for a small amount of money. List instead recruited subjects in actual marketplaces to participate in experiments, sometimes unbeknownst to even the subjects. [20] List's field experiments have found that gift exchange is not as powerful a motivator of labor effort as earlier research found, [21] that social preferences are not as pronounced as prior research found, [22] and that the divergence between Willingness to Pay and Willingness to Accept often called the endowment effect, predicted by prospect theory, disappears with market experience. [23]
List's recent work in behavioral economics has found that framing can induce increased worker productivity, [24] and has been picked up by several corporations around the world.
List has published research on the impact of environmental regulation on economic production [25] and on endangered species. [26] List's research has also focused on testing non-market valuation mechanisms in the field frequently used in contingent valuation [27] and in testing different incentives to promote environmentally friendly technology adoption. [28] He also teaches in Kiel University Research Institute in summer 2017 where he developed ideas on non-market valuation using field experiments.
List has also brought social preferences and value of public goods to the marketplace by testing determinants of charitable giving. List has found that a number of the traditional techniques in the philanthropy world are not well understood. For example, the higher the announced seed money [29] the more people give. Also, matching grants [30] increase giving, but it doesn't matter if the match is 1:1 or 3:1. [31] List has also found that giving is easily influenced by incentives that discount the importance of altruism in motivating giving. For example, List has found that beauty [32] and social pressure [33] are important motivators for giving. In an experiment through a solicitation mailed to 300,000 households in Alaska, List found that people are more likely to give because they want to feel good, rather than from pure altruism. [34]
Some of his field experimental work on charitable fundraising were highlighted in The New York Times Magazine . [35] In a 2009 Crain's Chicago Business article, List is referred to as a "rock star" in the area of philanthropy. [36] In his role as Visiting Robert F. Hartsook Chair in Fundraising at Indiana's Lilly School of Philanthropy, he works to apply academic research for the benefit of fundraising practitioners. [37] He also serves as principal investigator for the Science of Philanthropy Initiative. [38]
List's recent research focuses on increasing educational achievement. In 2008 he worked with Chicago Heights, IL to design cash incentives for ninth graders and their parents to increase academic performance. [39] In 2009 he won a $10 million grant from the Griffin Foundation to study the returns to pre-school education by beginning a research study called the Chicago Heights Early Childhood Center (CHECC) [40] [41] and to test the impact of performance pay for teachers in Chicago Heights, IL. [42]
The CHECC is aimed at studying programs that will decrease the achievement gap. The goal of CHECC is to intervene as early as possible to generate effects that are as great as possible. [41] The center was started by List together with world-renowned scholars at the University of Chicago and Harvard University, was awarded a $10M grant from the Griffin Foundation to launch the Chicago Heights Early Childhood Center (CHECC), one of the most comprehensive longitudinal early childhood studies ever conducted. With nearly 1,500 child participants, CHECC aimed to identify programs and strategies for improving student education in America’s schools and to try to understand how to best foster development during the early years of a child’s life and to place children on a successful path. Test scores of children participating showing improvement, he 2011-2012 mid-year assessment scores revealed an impressive 16.75% percentile increase from 2010 fall assessment scores. Children entering the program often test below average (35.5-percentile), but by the mid-year assessment of the second year, the majority of children are scoring at average (50-percentile), priming them for kindergarten and further educational attainment. [41]
As part of the CHECC Professor List and his team also established a Parent Academy, a program that paid parents a stipend of up to $7,000 per year to attend bi-weekly workshops with their children and learn about parenting strategies. [41] Findings from their randomized evaluation reveal that incentives to parents lead to large gains in achievement and that preschool programs may result in sustained positive impacts on achievement. They continue to track progress and results for graduated students.
List co-founded and co-directs the Thirty Million Words Center for Early Learning and Public Health along with Dana L. Suskind. [43]
List has studied the economics of discrimination, finding that discrimination in marketplaces is statistical discrimination, rarely motivated by animus. [44] He has also investigated gender differences in competition and wages, finding that men are more likely to apply for jobs that offer incentive pay than women. [45] He has also researched the role of gender in competition in matrilineal and patriarchal societies, finding that women in matrilineal societies opt to compete at similar levels to men in patriarchal societies. [46] List has also used experiments to test ideas in finance. He has tested the options model, [47] information cascades, [48] and the equity premium puzzle [49] with undergraduate students and professional traders. Many of these ideas were advanced by List when he taught at the Finnish School of Finance in 2007 on field experiments in Finance.
List married surgeon Dana L. Suskind in 2018 [50] and resides with his eight children in Hyde Park, Chicago.
A collection of a few of the recent pieces written on List's field experiments can be found in the following articles.
James Joseph Heckman is an American economist and Nobel laureate who serves as the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago, where he is also a professor at the College, a professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, Director of the Center for the Economics of Human Development (CEHD), and Co-Director of Human Capital and Economic Opportunity (HCEO) Global Working Group. He is also a professor of law at the Law School, a senior research fellow at the American Bar Foundation, and a research associate at the NBER. He received the John Bates Clark Medal in 1983, and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2000, which he shared with Daniel McFadden. He is known principally for his pioneering work in econometrics and microeconomics.
Gary Stanley Becker was an American economist who received the 1992 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He was a professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago, and was a leader of the third generation of the Chicago school of economics.
Kenneth Joseph Arrow was an American economist, mathematician, writer, and political theorist. Along with John Hicks, he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1972.
Vernon Lomax Smith is an American economist who is currently a professor of economics and law at Chapman University. He was formerly the McLellan/Regent’s Professor of Economics at the University of Arizona, a professor of economics and law at George Mason University, and a board member of the Mercatus Center. Along with Daniel Kahneman, Smith won the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to behavioral economics and his work in the field of experimental economics, which helped establish “laboratory experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis, especially in the study of alternative market mechanisms”.
Behavioral economics is the study of the psychological, cognitive, emotional, cultural and social factors involved in the decisions of individuals or institutions, and how these decisions deviate from those implied by classical economic theory.
Eugene Francis "Gene" Fama is an American economist, best known for his empirical work on portfolio theory, asset pricing, and the efficient-market hypothesis.
The Chicago school of economics is a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the work of the faculty at the University of Chicago, some of whom have constructed and popularized its principles. Milton Friedman and George Stigler are considered the leading scholars of the Chicago school.
Experimental economics is the application of experimental methods to study economic questions. Data collected in experiments are used to estimate effect size, test the validity of economic theories, and illuminate market mechanisms. Economic experiments usually use cash to motivate subjects, in order to mimic real-world incentives. Experiments are used to help understand how and why markets and other exchange systems function as they do. Experimental economics have also expanded to understand institutions and the law.
Sendhil Mullainathan is an American professor of Computation and Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the author of Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. He was hired with tenure by Harvard in 2004 after having spent six years at MIT.
The Allais paradox is a choice problem designed by Maurice Allais to show an inconsistency of actual observed choices with the predictions of expected utility theory. Rather than adhering to rationality, the Allais paradox proves that individuals rarely make rational decisions consistently when required to do so immediately. The independence axiom of expected utility theory, which requires that the preferences of an individual should not change when altering two lotteries by equal proportions, was proven to be violated by the paradox.
Samuel Stebbins Bowles, is an American economist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he continues to teach courses on microeconomics and the theory of institutions. His work belongs to the neo-Marxian tradition of economic thought. However, his perspective on economics is eclectic and draws on various schools of thought, including what he and others refer to as post-Walrasian economics.
Michael Robert Kremer is an American development economist currently serving as University Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago and Director of the Development Innovation Lab at the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics. Kremer formerly served as the Gates Professor of Developing Societies at Harvard University, a role he held from 2003 to 2020. In 2019, Kremer was jointly awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, together with Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty."
Joshua David Angrist is an Israeli–American economist and Ford Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Angrist, together with Guido Imbens, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2021 "for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships".
Alvin Eliot Roth is an American academic. He is the Craig and Susan McCaw professor of economics at Stanford University and the Gund professor of economics and business administration emeritus at Harvard University. He was President of the American Economic Association in 2017.
Konstantin Sonin is a Russian economist. He is a professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), London, and an associate research fellow at the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics. In recognition for his outstanding research in the field of political economy, in December 2015, he was named the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor of the University of Chicago.
Social preferences describe the human tendency to not only care about one's own material payoff, but also the reference group's payoff or/and the intention that leads to the payoff. Social preferences are studied extensively in behavioral and experimental economics and social psychology. Types of social preferences include altruism, fairness, reciprocity, and inequity aversion. The field of economics originally assumed that humans were rational economic actors, and as it became apparent that this was not the case, the field began to change. The research of social preferences in economics started with lab experiments in 1980, where experimental economists found subjects' behavior deviated systematically from self-interest behavior in economic games such as ultimatum game and dictator game. These experimental findings then inspired various new economic models to characterize agent's altruism, fairness and reciprocity concern between 1990 and 2010. More recently, there are growing amounts of field experiments that study the shaping of social preference and its applications throughout society.
Michael Patrick Keane is an American-born economist; he is the Wm. Polk Carey Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University. Keane was previously a professor at the University of New South Wales and the Nuffield Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford. He is considered one of the world's leading experts in the fields of Choice Modelling, structural modelling, simulation estimation, and panel data econometrics.
Urs Fischbacher is a Swiss economist and professor of applied economic research at the University of Konstanz. He is director of the Thurgau Economic Institute, an affiliated institute of the University of Konstanz. He pioneered the field of software tools for experimental economics.
Robert A. Pollak is an economist. Pollak has made contributions to the specification and estimation of consumer demand systems, social choice theory, the theory of the cost of living index, and since the early 1980s, to the economics of the family and to demography. He is currently the Hernreich Distinguished Professor of Economics at Washington University in St. Louis, holding joint appointments in the Faculty of Arts & Sciences and in the Olin Business School.
Anya Samek is an American economist who works in the fields of applied economics, behavioral economics, experimental economics, and strategy. She is currently an associate professor of economics at the Rady School of Management at the University of California, San Diego.
{{cite journal}}
: Cite journal requires |journal=
(help)