Carly Urban

Carly Urban appears in New study reveals a "smartphone penalty" that distorts survey results as the economist interviewed about whether smartphones are distorting financial-knowledge survey results. She frames the reported decline in U.S. financial literacy as a measurement question: before treating the decline as a pure knowledge drop, researchers need to account for the shift from desktop survey-taking to phone survey-taking.

Urban’s contribution is the experimental evidence behind Smartphone Survey Penalty. By using the Understanding America Study to assign respondents to smartphone or non-smartphone modes, her team tested whether device type itself changed knowledge-question performance.

Connections

• Marketplace Tech - show context for the interview.
• Olivia Valdez - co-author whose experimental-psychology perspective helped frame the attention hypothesis.
• FINRA Foundation and National Financial Capability Study - financial-literacy trend that prompted the research question.
• Understanding America Study and University of Southern California - panel and institutional setting for the randomized device experiment.
• Smartphone Survey Penalty, Survey Mode Effects, and Financial Literacy Measurement - concepts sharpened by Urban’s explanation.