How might the visibility of an author's name and/or institutional affiliation allow bias to enter the evaluation of economics papers? We ask highly qualified journal editors to review abstracts of solo-authored papers which differ along the dimensions of gender and institution of the author. We exogenously vary whether editors observe the name and/or institution of the author. We identify positive name visibility effects for female economists and positive institution visibility effects for economists at the top institutions. Our results suggest that male economists at top institutions benefit the most from non-blind evaluations, followed by female economists (regardless of their institution).

We investigate the impact of peer interaction on the quality of financial decision making in a laboratory experiment. Face-to-face communication with a randomly assigned peer significantly improves the quality of subsequent private decisions even though simple mimicry would have the opposite effect. We present evidence that the mechanism involves general conceptual learning (because the benefits of communication extend to previously unseen tasks), and that the most effective learning relationships are horizontal rather than vertical (because people with weak skills benefit most when their partners also have weak skills). The benefits of demonstrably effective financial education do not propagate to peers.

How did the Great Recession affect the college degree fields? Utilizing the geographic variation in the severity of the recession in the US, I answer this question using the differences-in-differences and synthetic controls approaches. To explore these effects systematically, I categorize fields based on their sensitivity to the recession. The results show that there was a shift from recession-sensitive majors towards recession-resistant majors. The effects were immediate and larger for more local institutions. These findings suggest that students’ expectations about future labor market outcomes are affected by shocks to the current local labor market conditions.

We study the importance of job-related and non-job-related factors in students' college major choices. Using a staggered intervention that allows us to provide students information about many different aspects of majors and to compare the magnitudes of the effects of each piece of information, we show that major choices depend on a wide set of factors. While students do not change their choices when given information about earnings, they do update their choices when told about other aspects of majors. The non-job-related factors, such as a major's course difficulty and gender composition, are important to students but not well-known to them. We also find that male and female students value different major characteristics in different ways. Lower-ability females flee from majors that they learn are more difficult than they had believed, while other students do not. On the other hand, male students are averse to being taught by female faculty, while female students are not. Overall, our results show that a variety of factors are important for students' major choices and that different factors matter for male and female students.