Let me inform you of the following research seminar.

Date: April 24 (Thu.)  , 2025 
Time:5:20PM -6:50PM
Venue: 11th Floor, Bldg.No.2 Meeting Room B
Speaker: Jude Bayham (Colorado State University) 
Organizer: Takuya Hasebe
Language: English

Title: Observing the unobservable: Connecting persistent emotional state to behavior in risky contexts 
Abstract:
Economists rely on experiments and surveys to measure typically unobserved subjective attributes, e.g., preference, belief, and emotion, that are important for understanding human behaviors. Dependence on these data collection modes limits the ability to connect subjective traits with behavior in a large-scale natural setting. Here, we use posts on social media platforms and natural language processing to infer individuals' persistent emotional state, and link this attribute to the behavior of 500,000 individuals during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that fearfulness is a persistent trait associated with specific individuals over time rather than associated solely with a single experience and that these high-fear individuals reduce out-of-home activities 4.2-6.9 percent more than low-fear individuals. The ability to observe subjective attributes at scale can enable better-identified economic measures and better-targeted economic policy.