林明仁 Ming-Jen Lin​

We conduct a field experiment on electricity conservation to study whetherrevealing both the competitive state and the social state in a group contestaffects individual beliefs and efforts. Our experiment randomizes groupcomposition, participation, and types of information received in the contest.We find that contestants without feedback about relative performance haddifficulty assessing their group's competitive status, and laggards within agroup tended to be overconfident about their relative contribution. In addition,we find that contestants receiving both competitive and social informationwere more likely to have correct beliefs about their positions during thecontest and exerted the most effort. Meanwhile, contestants receiving noperformance feedback did not behave differently from those who did notparticipate in the contest. Overall, contestants reduced their energy use by 10%during the contest. Our results support the notion that providing feedback isimportant in a group contest

In this paper, we study the intergenerational earnings mobility between fathers and sons in Taiwan. We apply the two-sample approach developed by Björklund and Jäntti (Am Econ Rev 87(5):1009–1018, 1997) and find that the intergenerational earnings elasticity in Taiwan was around 0.4–0.5 in both the early 1990s and the late 2000s. We also estimate the intergenerational rank association in earnings to have been around 0.3 in both periods. Intergenerational earnings mobility in Taiwan is similar to that in less mobile countries such as the USA, and it appears to remain stable during a period of rapid economic development.

We develop a simple algorithm for detecting exam cheating between students who copy off one another's exams. When this algorithm is applied to exams in a general science course at a top university, we find strong evidence of cheating by at least 10% of the students. Students studying together cannot explain our findings. Matching incorrect answers proves to be a stronger indicator of cheating than matching correct answers. When seating locations are randomly assigned, and monitoring is increased, cheating virtually disappears.

“Echo chamber” is a metaphorical description of a situation in which beliefs are amplified inside a closed network, and social media platforms provide an environment that is well-suited to this phenomenon. Depending on the scale of the echo chamber, a user’s judgment of different opinions may be restricted. The current study focuses on detecting echoing interaction between a post and its related comments to then quantify the predominating degree of echo chamber behavior on Facebook pages. To enable such detection, two content-based features are designed; the first aids stance representation of comments on a particular discussion topic, and the second focuses on the type and intensity of emotion elicited by a subject. This work also introduces data-driven semi-supervised approaches to extract such features from social media data.

This paper utilizes the eradication campaign in Taiwan in the 1950s to estimate the long‐term impacts of early‐life (in utero and postnatal) exposure to malaria. Matching adults in the 1992–2012 Taiwan Social Change Survey to the malaria intensity in their individual place and year of birth, difference‐in‐difference estimation shows strong evidence that the eradication increased men's own educational attainment as well as their family income in adulthood. We also use the 1980 census data to show there was a sharp education increase after the eradication. Furthermore, the eradication increased the educational attainment of married men's spouses. Finally, quantile regressions show that the effect concentrated on the lower percentile of the income distribution. Overall, our results suggest negative effects of early‐life exposure to malaria.