Norms and Practices in the Disclosure of Conflicts of Interest: Evidence from the Field of Economics

2023-09-18

2023-11-18

We intend to analyze the responses to the survey using various summary and analytical statistical methods. For example, questions of interest that could be answered include but are not limited to:
• Conditional on having received tenure, do more respondents disclose engaging in consulting activities?
• What are the changes in beliefs post disclosure treatment in the vignettes, how do these beliefs change vis-a-vis monetary, temporal and various other aspects
• What are the differences amongst vignettes, are some conflicts more important than others? For example, are pure ideological conflicts more or less relevant than conflicts driven by incentives?
• What is the effect of priming? Do the respondents react differently to economics vignettes when science/business vignettes are shown first? Are scientific conflicts more or less objective than economics conflicts?
In addition to being able to ask questions about individual groups of respondents’ beliefs, our different samples permit us to compare beliefs between groups. For example, we could investigate how different groups differently (or similarly) perceive (the intensity of) certain kinds of conflicts of interest. In each of these within - and between - group analyses, we intend to exploit the random variation in the generated vignettes to understand how groups respond to varying degrees of conflict of interest.

We intend to disseminate our survey to five groups of individuals: “most-elite” economists, “elite” economists, economists generally, journalists, and the general population. We are interested in these five distinct groups for a number of reasons. The first three groups provide gradations of career concerns etc. among economists who are likely to be most familiar with the particular institutional dynamics that we are interested in. Second, journalists are of interest to us because they represent a sample of “watchdogs” who are often trained to investigate and root out various kinds of potential misbehavior. That is, their opinions about what constitutes conflicts of interest – and if there exist discrepancies between what economists and journalists think – are of particular interest. Finally, we are interested in the opinions of the general public, who serve as another barometer of potential conflicts of interest. Though we cannot guarantee full access to contact information, we intend to identify the following four groups. We define the “most elite” group of economists as those participating in the “Expert Surveys” conducted by the Kent A. Clark Center for Global Markets at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business. The number of active panelists in this group varies over time but is approximately 130 at the time of writing. We define the “elite” group of economists as those who are affiliated with either the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) or the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). Both are selective think tanks that require some kind of nomination and/or application for an economist to join. For the NBER, affiliates must have a primary appointment at a university, whereas CEPR affiliates may hold primary appointments at other institutions such as other think tanks, central banks, international organizations etc. Whereas the NBER membership is primarily American, CEPR membership is primarily European. We plan to construct the general sample of economists as a collection of economists in Javdani et al's database of economists (deduplicating the most elite, NBER and CEPR subgroups). We ensure that each economist respondent is a member of only one of these groups. The latter two groups are constructed as follows. We acquired the email IDs of journalists in the USA through presshunt.co who have accumulated one of the biggest journalist databases. We have about 13,000 email IDs of business and finance journalists and 5843 email IDs of journalists in government and politics. This sample of journalists is of interest to us because of their training/practice of journalism in addition to having some domain knowledge in economics/business. Finally, we intend to use YouGov’s services to identify a representative sample of the US population

randomization done by qualtrics in the survey vignettes

Individual

Yes

3 Major Clusters - Economists, Journalists, General public

We expect 2000 economists, 2000 Journalists, 1500 general public

Each cluster has its own treatment arm (a separate survey for each), therefore 3. Economists, Journalists, General public