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Women donate less to charity than men in some contexts

By Guest PostMay 26, 2013CultureBerkeley, data, donation, economist, face to face, gautam rao, john list, philanthropy, specific altruism, stefano dellavigna, uchicago, ulrike malmendier, university of california, university of chicago

Given the chance, women are more likely than men to opt out of a request to give a charitable donation, a group of economists have found.

The issue of which gender is more generous has been debated for years. A new field experiment conducted by scholars at the University of Chicago and University of California, Berkeley shows that when it’s easy to avoid making a donation, such as not responding to a door-to-door solicitor, women are less likely than men to give. (more…)

Author Paul Tough Gives Talk on the Traits that Help Children Succeed

By Guest PostNovember 14, 2012Culture, Educationariel kalil, character strength, character traits, chicago harris, college, completion rate, conscientiousness, crime lab, curiosity, dimension, homecoming, how children succeed, information, international house, james heckman, joshua anderson, journalistic enterprise, neighborhoods, nobel laureate, non cognitive skills, northwestern university, optimism, paul tough, perseverance, public policy, school success, Science, self control, social policy, stress, success, trauma, uchicago

To Paul Tough, his recent visit to the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy was “a nice homecoming.”

During the two years of research for his new book, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character, Tough spent time at UChicago and in its surrounding neighborhoods.

“The nerve center of my journalistic enterprise was a small dorm room in International House,” he joked Oct. 18 in a speech at Chicago Harris, saying that many of the ideas in the book drew from work in the Department of Economics, the Economics Research Center, the Crime Lab and from the Consortium on Chicago School Research. (more…)

Student Performance Improves When Teachers Given Incentives Upfront

By Guest PostAugust 13, 2012Educationacademic performance, bonus payment, broad foundation, chicago heights, economic research, field experiment, gadi barlevy, incentive, john list, loss aversion, motivate behavior, percentile, robert m beren, roland fryer, sally sadoff, student performance, teacher, teacher incentive, thinklink predictive assessment, thomas amadio, uchicago, upfront

A bonus payment to teachers can improve student academic performance — but only when it is given upfront, on the condition that part of the money must be returned if student performance fails to improve, research at the University of Chicago shows.

The study showed that students gained as much as a 10 percentile increase in their scores compared to students with similar backgrounds — if their teacher received a bonus at the beginning of the year, with conditions attached. There was no gain for students when teachers were offered the bonus at the end of the school year, the research found. (more…)

Organics Probably Formed Easily in Early Solar System

By Guest PostApril 4, 2012Scienceamino acids, amphiphiles, bombard, building blocks, cellular membrane, cometary, computer simulation, DNA, dynamics, fred ciesla, life on earth, meteorite, nasa ames, nucleobases, organic compound, planet, proteins, rna, science express, scott sandford, solar nebula, uchicago, ultraviolet radiation, uv radiation

Complex organic compounds, including many important to life on Earth, were readily produced under conditions that likely prevailed in the primordial solar system. Scientists at the University of Chicago and NASA Ames Research Center came to this conclusion after linking computer simulations to laboratory experiments.

Fred Ciesla, assistant professor in geophysical sciences at UChicago, simulated the dynamics of the solar nebula, the cloud of gas and dust from which the sun and the planets formed. Although every dust particle within the nebula behaved differently, they all experienced the conditions needed for organics to form over a simulated million-year period. (more…)

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Women donate less to charity than men in some contexts

Author Paul Tough Gives Talk on the Traits that Help Children Succeed

Student Performance Improves When Teachers Given Incentives Upfront

Organics Probably Formed Easily in Early Solar System