Felix Chopra

Studies with Null Results

Does the evaluation of research studies depend on whether a study yielded a null result? In a recent project, Felix Chopra (together with I. Haaland, C. Roth and A. Stegmann) conducted a survey experiment with researchers from the top 200 economics departments in the world and documented that studies with null results are perceived to be less publishable, of lower quality, less important, and less precisely estimated than studies with large and statistically significant results, even when holding constant all other study features, including the sample size and the precision of the estimates. These findings highlight the value of pre-results review.

Mr. Chopra’s main research interests are in economics & psychology, political economy, and household finance. He is especially interested in the role of beliefs and expectations in shaping economic and political behavior. His work has examined a variety of topics, such as the role of preferences and beliefs as drivers of news consumption decisions, perceptions of social norms about climate change behavior, or the impact of popular financial advice. Methodologically, his research primarily relies on experimental methods, including survey and field experiments, as well as natural experiments.

While at the ifo Institute, Felix Chopra will visit Oliver Falck and plans to work on a project studying the role of home price expectations as drivers of renters’ and homeowners’ current spending decisions, combining a field experiment with an information intervention with administrative data on spending decisions in the US.

Felix Chopra is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Department of Economics and the Center for Economic Behavior and Inequality (CEBI) at the University of Copenhagen. He has published and has forthcoming papers in the Journal of Public Economics and the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics. In 2022, he received the CESifo Best Paper Award of the Doctoral Workshop on the Economics of Digitization for his work on popular financial advice. He gained a PhD in Economics from the University of Bonn in 2022 and holds a BSc. in Economics and an MSc in Mathematics from the University of Bonn.