Did you know that your siblings can influence whether you vote? Well, now you do! Social scientists have long known that parents influence kids' political socialization. And we have some new evidence that the opposite occurs too--kids influence parents. But, we have little causal evidence of peer effects/spillovers from one "ultimate peer"--siblings--to another. In our new paper, we use a regression discontinuity design based on election eligibility and a large sample of millions of sibling pairs drawn from national education administrative records matched to voter files to show that siblings influence each others' voting patterns. This effect goes from older siblings to younger siblings AND from younger siblings to older siblings. The effects are in line with other effect estimates in the literature. Feedback welcome!

Research has shown that Uber drivers are 2x more likely to cancel a ride if the passenger’s name is one used predominantly by African Americans. But this new paper shows that type of discrimination can be eliminated fairly easily! Within the standard Uber app, drivers see only the passenger’s rating before accepting a ride. Once they accept the ride, they see the name of the passenger. However, if you simply increase the size of the font of the rider's rating to draw attention to the quality of the passenger you basically eliminate this form of discrimination. Fascinating!