M Keith Chen
Biographic Data
| ID | 221579 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Keith Chen |
| GIVEN NAMES | M Keith |
| FAMILY NAME | Chen |
| SIGNATURE | CHEN M K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Yale University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3703-5990 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 94 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The influence of the perceived burdensomeness on the efficacy needs: The role of anticipated social exclusion and self-affirmation
Smartphone Data Reveal Neighborhood-Level Racial Disparities in Police Presence
Research on policing has focused on documented actions such as stops and arrests—less is known about patrols and presence. We map the neighborhood movement of nearly 10,000 officers across 21 of America’s largest cities using anonymized smartphone data. Police spend 0.36% more time in neighborhoods for each percentage point increase in Black residents. This neighborhood-level disparity persists after controlling for density, socioeconomic status,…
Understanding the effects of teacher credibility on students' cognitive engagement in online learning: The mediating roles of academic self-efficacy and motivational regulation strategies
Teacher credibility is one of the most critical drivers of students' engagement in online learning. However, discussions about how and to what extent teacher credibility affects students' engagement are lacking. Therefore, this study aimed to explore the effect of teacher credibility on students' cognitive engagement by adopting source credibility theory and social cognitive theory. 368 graduate students enrolled in online courses were surveyed. …
Canadian Strategy Against Gender-Based Violence and Gaps
Promoting the Essential Services Package (ESP) for Women and Girls Subject to Violence has led to an emphasis on legislative commitments to a survivor-centred strategy. Such legislation includes provisions for fiscal planning, standards of services, and official programs to support networks of community-based interventions to build capacity, share information, and co-generate knowledge across regions. This study identifies gaps in the Canadian st…
Racial Disparities in Voting Wait Times: Evidence from Smartphone Data
Equal access to voting is a core feature of democratic government. Using data from hundreds of thousands of smartphone users, we quantify a racial disparity in voting wait times across a nationwide sample of polling places during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Relative to entirely white neighborhoods, residents of entirely black neighborhoods waited 29% longer to vote and were 74% more likely to spend more than thirty minutes at their polli…
News and Geolocated Social Media Accurately Measure Protest Size Variation
Larger protests are more likely to lead to policy changes than small ones are, but whether or not attendance estimates provided in news or generated from social media are biased is an open question. This letter closes the question: news and geolocated social media data generate accurate estimates of protest size variation. This claim is substantiated using cellphone location data from more than 10 million individuals during the 2017 United States…
The effect of partisanship and political advertising on close family ties
Curtailed conversations Most articles written about U.S. politics in the past few years have mentioned the increasing polarization of the electorate. But is this real, or does it merely reflect the increasing polarization of the media? Chen and Rohla estimate that in 2016, Thanksgiving dinners in which the hosts and guests lived in oppositely voting precincts were up to 50 minutes shorter than same-party-precinct dinners. That is, family members,…
The Value of Flexible Work: Evidence from Uber Drivers
Technology has facilitated new, nontraditional work arrangements, including the ride-sharing company Uber. Uber drivers provide rides anytime they choose. Using data on hourly earnings and driving, we document driver utilization of this real-time flexibility. We propose that the value of flexibility can be measured as deriving from time variation in the drivers’ reservation wage. Measuring time variation in drivers’ reservation wages allows us to…
The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets
Languages differ widely in the ways they encode time. I test the hypothesis that the languages that grammatically associate the future and the present, foster future-oriented behavior. This prediction arises naturally when well-documented effects of language structure are merged with models of intertemporal choice. Empirically, I find that speakers of such languages: save more, retire with more wealth, smoke less, practice safer sex, and are less…
The evolution of decision-making under risk: Framing effects in monkey risk preferences
How choice affects and reflects preferences: Revisiting the free-choice paradigm
After making a choice between 2 objects, people reevaluate their chosen item more positively and their rejected item more negatively (i.e., they spread the alternatives). Since Brehm's (1956) initial free-choice experiment, psychologists have interpreted the spreading of alternatives as evidence for choice-induced attitude change. It is widely assumed to occur because choosing creates cognitive dissonance, which is then reduced through rationaliz…
Is choice a reliable predictor of choice? A comment on Sagarin and Skowronski
Do Harsher Prison Conditions Reduce Recidivism? A Discontinuity-based Approach
We estimate the causal effect of prison conditions on recidivism rates by exploiting a discontinuity in the assignment of federal prisoners to security levels. Inmates housed in higher security levels are no less likely to recidivate than those housed in minimum security; if anything, our estimates suggest that harsher prison conditions lead to more post-release crime. Though small sample sizes limit the precision of our estimates, we argue that …
How Basic Are Behavioral Biases? Evidence from Capuchin Monkey Trading Behavior
Behavioral economics has demonstrated systematic decision-making biases in both lab and field data. Do these biases extend across contexts, cultures, or even species? We investigate this question by introducing fiat currency and trade to a colony of capuchin monkeys and recovering their preferences over a range of goods and gambles. We show that capuchins react rationally to both price and wealth shocks but display several hallmark biases when fa…
Some Thoughts on the Adaptive Function of Inequity Aversion: An Alternative to Brosnan's Social Hypothesis
How Basic Are Behavioral Biases? Evidence from Capuchin Monkey Trading Behavior
Behavioral economics has demonstrated systematic decision-making biases in both lab and field data. Do these biases extend across contexts, cultures, or even species? We investigate this question by introducing fiat currency and trade to a colony of capuchin monkeys and recovering their preferences over a range of goods and gambles. We show that capuchins react rationally to both price and wealth shocks but display several hallmark biases when fa…
The Value of Flexible Work: Evidence from Uber Drivers
Technology has facilitated new, nontraditional work arrangements, including the ride-sharing company Uber. Uber drivers provide rides anytime they choose. Using data on hourly earnings and driving, we document driver utilization of this real-time flexibility. We propose that the value of flexibility can be measured as deriving from time variation in the drivers’ reservation wage. Measuring time variation in drivers’ reservation wages allows us to…
News and Geolocated Social Media Accurately Measure Protest Size Variation
Larger protests are more likely to lead to policy changes than small ones are, but whether or not attendance estimates provided in news or generated from social media are biased is an open question. This letter closes the question: news and geolocated social media data generate accurate estimates of protest size variation. This claim is substantiated using cellphone location data from more than 10 million individuals during the 2017 United States…
How choice affects and reflects preferences: Revisiting the free-choice paradigm
After making a choice between 2 objects, people reevaluate their chosen item more positively and their rejected item more negatively (i.e., they spread the alternatives). Since Brehm's (1956) initial free-choice experiment, psychologists have interpreted the spreading of alternatives as evidence for choice-induced attitude change. It is widely assumed to occur because choosing creates cognitive dissonance, which is then reduced through rationaliz…
Is choice a reliable predictor of choice? A comment on Sagarin and Skowronski
Some Thoughts on the Adaptive Function of Inequity Aversion: An Alternative to Brosnan's Social Hypothesis
The evolution of decision-making under risk: Framing effects in monkey risk preferences
How Basic Are Behavioral Biases? Evidence from Capuchin Monkey Trading Behavior
Behavioral economics has demonstrated systematic decision-making biases in both lab and field data. Do these biases extend across contexts, cultures, or even species? We investigate this question by introducing fiat currency and trade to a colony of capuchin monkeys and recovering their preferences over a range of goods and gambles. We show that capuchins react rationally to both price and wealth shocks but display several hallmark biases when fa…
Some Thoughts on the Adaptive Function of Inequity Aversion: An Alternative to Brosnan's Social Hypothesis
Do Harsher Prison Conditions Reduce Recidivism? A Discontinuity-based Approach
We estimate the causal effect of prison conditions on recidivism rates by exploiting a discontinuity in the assignment of federal prisoners to security levels. Inmates housed in higher security levels are no less likely to recidivate than those housed in minimum security; if anything, our estimates suggest that harsher prison conditions lead to more post-release crime. Though small sample sizes limit the precision of our estimates, we argue that …
Is choice a reliable predictor of choice? A comment on Sagarin and Skowronski
The evolution of decision-making under risk: Framing effects in monkey risk preferences
How choice affects and reflects preferences: Revisiting the free-choice paradigm
After making a choice between 2 objects, people reevaluate their chosen item more positively and their rejected item more negatively (i.e., they spread the alternatives). Since Brehm's (1956) initial free-choice experiment, psychologists have interpreted the spreading of alternatives as evidence for choice-induced attitude change. It is widely assumed to occur because choosing creates cognitive dissonance, which is then reduced through rationaliz…
The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets
Languages differ widely in the ways they encode time. I test the hypothesis that the languages that grammatically associate the future and the present, foster future-oriented behavior. This prediction arises naturally when well-documented effects of language structure are merged with models of intertemporal choice. Empirically, I find that speakers of such languages: save more, retire with more wealth, smoke less, practice safer sex, and are less…
The effect of partisanship and political advertising on close family ties
Curtailed conversations Most articles written about U.S. politics in the past few years have mentioned the increasing polarization of the electorate. But is this real, or does it merely reflect the increasing polarization of the media? Chen and Rohla estimate that in 2016, Thanksgiving dinners in which the hosts and guests lived in oppositely voting precincts were up to 50 minutes shorter than same-party-precinct dinners. That is, family members,…
The Value of Flexible Work: Evidence from Uber Drivers
Technology has facilitated new, nontraditional work arrangements, including the ride-sharing company Uber. Uber drivers provide rides anytime they choose. Using data on hourly earnings and driving, we document driver utilization of this real-time flexibility. We propose that the value of flexibility can be measured as deriving from time variation in the drivers’ reservation wage. Measuring time variation in drivers’ reservation wages allows us to…
News and Geolocated Social Media Accurately Measure Protest Size Variation
Larger protests are more likely to lead to policy changes than small ones are, but whether or not attendance estimates provided in news or generated from social media are biased is an open question. This letter closes the question: news and geolocated social media data generate accurate estimates of protest size variation. This claim is substantiated using cellphone location data from more than 10 million individuals during the 2017 United States…
Racial Disparities in Voting Wait Times: Evidence from Smartphone Data
Equal access to voting is a core feature of democratic government. Using data from hundreds of thousands of smartphone users, we quantify a racial disparity in voting wait times across a nationwide sample of polling places during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Relative to entirely white neighborhoods, residents of entirely black neighborhoods waited 29% longer to vote and were 74% more likely to spend more than thirty minutes at their polli…
Canadian Strategy Against Gender-Based Violence and Gaps
Promoting the Essential Services Package (ESP) for Women and Girls Subject to Violence has led to an emphasis on legislative commitments to a survivor-centred strategy. Such legislation includes provisions for fiscal planning, standards of services, and official programs to support networks of community-based interventions to build capacity, share information, and co-generate knowledge across regions. This study identifies gaps in the Canadian st…
The influence of the perceived burdensomeness on the efficacy needs: The role of anticipated social exclusion and self-affirmation
Smartphone Data Reveal Neighborhood-Level Racial Disparities in Police Presence
Research on policing has focused on documented actions such as stops and arrests—less is known about patrols and presence. We map the neighborhood movement of nearly 10,000 officers across 21 of America’s largest cities using anonymized smartphone data. Police spend 0.36% more time in neighborhoods for each percentage point increase in Black residents. This neighborhood-level disparity persists after controlling for density, socioeconomic status,…
Understanding the effects of teacher credibility on students' cognitive engagement in online learning: The mediating roles of academic self-efficacy and motivational regulation strategies
Teacher credibility is one of the most critical drivers of students' engagement in online learning. However, discussions about how and to what extent teacher credibility affects students' engagement are lacking. Therefore, this study aimed to explore the effect of teacher credibility on students' cognitive engagement by adopting source credibility theory and social cognitive theory. 368 graduate students enrolled in online courses were surveyed. …
Economics (9 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Microeconomics (6 works) · Political science (5 works) · Social Psychology (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics (4 works) · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies (4 works) · Crime Patterns and Interventions (3 works) · Criminology (3 works)