Michael Haylock

Over the past three decades, advancements in collection methods for hematopoietic stem cell transplantation substantially reduced invasiveness and safety concerns. To what extent, however, registered donors are informed about extraction methods and how their beliefs drive their willingness to follow through with a donation is not well understood. Inaccurate beliefs about extraction methods may cause donors to overestimate their perceived cost, potentially reducing donations. In a survey with about 24,000 potential donors in Germany’s largest stem-cell registry, we investigate how beliefs about extraction methods affect potential donors’ willingness to follow through with a stem cell donation. We find widespread misconceptions about extraction methods, with many donors attributing a significant fraction of stem cell extractions to be coming from never-used methods. Importantly, a lack of knowledge and misconceptions about extraction methods persist among registered donors, often anchored to methods that prevailed at the time of registration. Exploring the link between donors’ beliefs and their (stated) willingness to donate, we find that accurate beliefs about lower extraction costs correlate with a 2.2–2.9 percentage points higher willingness to donate, representing a 40% reduction in donor unavailability. Our results highlight the need for informational campaigns to correct donors’ misconceptions and potentially save more lives among blood cancer patients.

Economic growth in Sweden during the early 20th Century was largely driven by industry. A significant contributor to this growth was the installation of different kinds of engines used to power factories. We use newly digitized data on engines and their energy source by industry sector, and combine this with municipality-level data of workers per industry sector to construct a new variable reflecting economic output using dirty engines. In turn, we assess the average externality of dirty output on mortality in the short-run, as defined by deaths over the population in the baseline year. Our results show substantial increases of up to 17% higher mortality in cities where large increases to dirty engine installations occurred, which is largely driven by the elderly. We also run a placebo test using clean powered industry and find no effect on mortality.

Offline volunteering was faced with new challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a survey experiment with 1207 student participants, we test the impact of informing subjects about blood donation urgency (shortage information), and secondly, the effect of providing information about measures taken to reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission at blood donation centers (hygiene information), on their inclination to donate during and after the COVID-19 lockdown. The results show that shortage information increases extensive-margin willingness to donate for non-donors by 15 percentage points (pp), on average, and increases the willingness to donate quickly for all respondents. Hygiene information, however, reduces prior donors’ intention to donate again by 8pp, on average, and reduces the willingness of non-donors to donate quickly.

The unavailability of potential stem cell donors poses a critical challenge for donor registries worldwide. This study investigates the impact of initiatives of a stem cell donor registry to enhance donors' availability for confirmatory typing. Initiatives ask donors to provide a sample for genetic analysis and/or information on their temporal unavailability. We analyzed 91,479 confirmatory typing requests from DKMS Germany, a large stem cell donor registry, exploiting a quasi-random initiative assignment based on observable characteristics. We find that, first, invitation to the initiatives increases donors' availability. Intention-to-treat estimates yield effects ranging from 2.5 to 3.2 percentage points, and local average treatment effects estimates range from 3.8 to 8.2 percentage points (baseline: 77.1%). Second, the difference in availability between participants and non-participants is over 10 percentage points. The initiatives yield a direct positive effect on donor availability and a selection effect through which participation signals a higher commitment. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

The unavailability of potential stem cell donors poses a critical challenge for donor registries worldwide. This study investigates the impact of initiatives of a stem cell donor registry to enhance donors' availability for confirmatory typing. Initiatives ask donors to provide a sample for genetic analysis and/or information on their temporal unavailability. We analyzed 91,479 confirmatory typing requests from DKMS Germany, a large stem cell donor registry, exploiting a quasi-random initiative assignment based on observable characteristics. We find that, first, invitation to the initiatives increases donors' availability. Intention-to-treat estimates yield effects ranging from 2.5 to 3.2 percentage points, and local average treatment effects estimates range from 3.8 to 8.2 percentage points (baseline: 77.1%). Second, the difference in availability between participants and non-participants is over 10 percentage points. The initiatives yield a direct positive effect on donor availability and a selection effect through which participation signals a higher commitment.

The aim of executive compensation plans is to incentivize executives to maximize long-term firm value. Past research shows that executives’ pay is determined by short-term stock performance to a substantial degree. This paper tests for distributional differences in the time horizon of the performance–pay relation, controlling for executive-firm fixed effects in a quantile regression framework. I identify short-term and long-term firm and industry performance using a filter and estimate distributional differences in the short-term and long-term performance–pay relation using method of moments–quantile regression (Machado and Santos Silva in J Econ 213:145–173, 2019). I find the right tail of the conditional total compensation distribution has a more long-term-oriented performance–pay relation than the left tail. By contrast, the right tail of the conditional accumulated wealth distribution has more short-term-oriented performance–pay relation than the left tail. Results show that asymmetry in short-term firm performance–pay relations may exist, but do not vary across the conditional distribution.