Derrick Xu 徐明垚[1] Curriculum Vitae
I am a PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Bristol, supervised by Profs Sarah Smith and Yanos Zylberberg. I am an applied microeconomist working in the fields of public, environmental, and behavioural economics.
I enjoy using computer science tools to analyse non-traditional data, such as text and images, to uncover behavioural insights that help us better understand social challenges.
Spillovers in the Charitable Market: Evidence from Reputation Shocks (sole-author) [draft]
Revise & Resubmit at Economic Journal
This paper provides novel evidence on the spillover effect of negative reputation shocks affecting a charity on donations to other charities. I identify negative reputation shocks to large charities by using sentiment analysis on the universe of news articles in the United Kingdom. I then link these large charities to all other charities by constructing measures of textual similarity between charities’ mission statements. I find that a negative reputation shock to a charity increases donations to other charities that share similar objectives. This finding is consistent with the charity market being a differentiated market in which donors care about charities’ missions and substitute across charities with similar objectives.
Only in My Backyard: The Effect of Flood Exposure on Environmental Behavior (sole-author) [draft]
Revise & Resubmit at Journal of Environmental Economics and Management
Does exposure to climate shocks make people behave more pro-environmentally? I use precise residential locations to identify people exposed to floods and analyse real-world donation records from 90,000 donors in England, along with longitudinal surveys. I show that, after being directly affected by floods, people are more likely to donate to environmental charities and support the Green Party. I also find suggestive evidence that people tend to reassess their own environmental effort as not enough after direct flood experience. However, exposure to floods affecting close neighbours does not elicit similar behavioural changes, indicating an “only in my backyard” phenomenon: on average, people react to climate shocks only when personally affected. Further, I show that people with strong universalist values do increase green donations after neighbouring floods. This suggests that the broader lack of response is driven by those with communitarian values, who typically care less about global environmental challenges.
Emotional Appeal: Why Do Charities Use Negative Framing? (sole-author)
I collected three million images from Twitter posts by around 2,000 charities and trained a deep learning model to predict the emotions they evoke. I find that charities differ in their emotional tone in ways largely unrelated to their stated missions. Moreover, donors’ preferences for emotional content vary and are correlated with their socioeconomic backgrounds and moral values. For example, better-educated donors and moral universalists are more likely to favour charities that use negative emotional appeals. As a result, charities have an incentive to maintain a specific emotional tone to differentiate themselves and attract particular donors. Besides, charities may use shock tactics – delivering sudden and intense negative emotions – to boost donations. Supporting this, I show that negative emotional shocks lead to immediate increases in donations, but their effectiveness diminishes with repeated use.
Do Crises Increase Parochial Altruism? Evidence from COVID (with Esteban Jaimovich and Sarah Smith)
The Impact of War-on-woke on Progressive Values and Prosocial Actions (with Sarah Smith)
Toward Understanding Decision-making by Charities (with Andreas Lange, Jonathan Meer and Jan Schmitz)
Data Analytics (postgraduate)
Economics Data (undergraduate)
Mathematics for Economics (undergraduate)
Econometrics II (undergraduate)
[1] My chinese name is 徐明垚 (Xú Míngyáo).
'徐' (Xú) is my family name — it's a common Chinese surname.
'明' (Míng) is my generational name, shared with others of the same generation in my ancestral village. It combines the sun (日) and moon (月), meaning ‘bright’.
'垚' (Yáo) is my personal name. It’s a rare character made of three '土' (earth) radicals, and it symbolises strength, stability, and potential.
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