Research

An unintended effect of school entrance age: pushing children ahead through private school. Journal Population Economics (2025), 38, 5.

The Effect of Spouses’ Relative Education on Household Time Allocation. Southern Economic Journal (2023), 89(3), 788-829.

Female Politicians and Corruption in Rural India, with Somdeep Chatterjee and Shiv Hastawala (accepted at the European Journal of Political Economy)

This paper leverages random assignment of female quotas for leadership positions on Indian village councils to assess its causal effect on corruption. Since the mid-1990s, India has mandated that at least one third of village council chief positions be randomly reserved for women. Using data from the Rural Economic and Demographic Survey (REDS) 2006, we find that an additional term reserved for a female head as opposed to just a single one reduces both the occurrence and amount of bribes paid to the local government by households. This reduction is also observed in bribes paid to other local officials suggesting downstream effects of electing female officials on corruption. As a potential mechanism, we provide speculative evidence that it takes time for women political leaders to establish and settle, and when they are able to do so, they appear more efficient and trans- parent, especially in terms of selecting households as beneficiaries for government programs.

Foreign Accents and Employer Beliefs: Experimental Evidence on Hiring Discrimination, with Ozlem Tonguc, Maria Zhu and Nicola Miller (under review; previously presented under the title “The Effects of a Foreign Accent on Hiring Discrimination”)

This study investigates whether employers in an online hiring experiment exhibit discrimination based on workers' accents that indicate English is not their primary language. To assess accent bias, we implement a randomized treatment design in which participants acting as employers are assigned to one of two conditions: a treatment where the worker's accent is revealed (“Accent Revealed”) or a control where it is not (“Accent Blind”). Using incentive-compatible methods, we elicit employers' beliefs about the productivity of randomly assigned workers, providing brief demographic information and audio clips that either reveal or mask accent characteristics. We evaluate worker productivity in two skills: Mathematics and Verbal reasoning. We find that employers rate accented workers as less capable than their non-accented counterparts in both skills, and this gap persists after providing employers with a signal of a worker's test score. Employers also display lower willingness to pay, particularly in Verbal skills tasks, even when provided with performance signals.

The Skills of Rich and Poor Country Workers, with David Slichter and Daniela Monge

What specific types of skills – e.g., scientific knowledge, math, or social skills – do workers raised in rich countries have that workers from poor countries lack? We investigate using information on occupation choices of immigrants. To an approximation, rich country workers are better at exactly those skills which are well-compensated in the U.S. economy, and in proportion to how well-compensated those skills are. Specifically, this means that rich country workers have the greatest advantages in skills related to the ability to generate new ideas (e.g., creativity and critical thinking), and that rich country workers’ skills align especially closely with the skills used in management occupations. Lastly, we find that workers from rich countries are more varied in their skills (e.g., what one Canadian is good at is different from what another Canadian is). These findings do not appear to be accounted for by the non-randomness of immigration or mismeasurement of skills. Our results are consistent with the view that international differences in skills arise primarily in response to differences in demand for skills.

The Effect of Fertility on Women’s Labor Supply: Heterogeneity by Gender Norms (under review)

This paper examines whether fertility's effect on women's labor supply is influenced by gender norms. To separate the role of gender norms from institutional features, I analyze the labor supply responses to childbearing among women in the United States, contrasting those born domestically with those born abroad. This includes a comparison between native and immigrant women, and further, among immigrants, between those from less and more gender-egalitarian countries. The variable of interest, having more than two children, is instrumented using the sex composition of the first two children. The findings indicate that women from all countries experience a reduction in employment in response to having more than two children. Moreover, the instrumental analysis reveals this effect to be quantitatively larger for women from less gender-egalitarian countries. Consequently, the results suggest that the negative effect of fertility on employment decreases with increased gender egalitarianism.

Lost in the Queue: Government Job Aspirations and Labor Market Outcomes,with Md Shahadath Hossain

We examine how the structure of public employment shapes labor market outcomes in a developing economy. In Bangladesh, college graduates can apply for elite government positions through the Bangladesh Civil Service (BCS) examination only before turning 30, creating strong incentives to queue for these jobs. Using a sharp regression discontinuity design around this age cutoff, we find that ineligibility increases the probability of employment by 7.1 percentage points, with no change in labor force participation. This transition manifests notable changes in sectoral and occupational composition, as more individuals enter the agriculture sector, informal firms, and non-salaried work, employments that likely underutilize the skills of college graduates. The findings are robust to a placebo test, alternative specifications, and a local randomization approach. Overall, the results point to queuing while eligible and lower-quality matches once eligibility ends. Policies that shorten recruitment queues or strengthen high-quality private-sector opportunities could improve labor market efficiency.

The Marriage Market Composition and the 2016 Presidential Election in the United States (with Xin Liang and Leila Salarpour Goodarzi)

Draft comming soon

• “The Effect of Countries’ Technology and Productivity on Human Capital” (with David Slichter)

• “Odd Work Schedule on Well-Being“ (with Xi Mao)

• “Multigenerational Households: Mothers' Employment, Childcare Needs and randparents Migration”