Works in Progress

 "Incentivizing Success: Assessing the Texas Incentive Allotment Program's Impact on Teacher Labor Markets and Student Achievement"

"Youth Violence and School Attendance: Evidence from New York City"

"Historical Patterns of Female Attrition from STEM: 1940-present"

 Working Papers

"Estimating Excess Female Attrition from STEM Occupations" [Link] [Presentation]

Senior Thesis Advised by Professor Joseph Altonji

The phenomenon of female attrition from science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is often referred to as a “leaky pipeline.” In my senior essay, I explore attrition rates at two key junctures in this pipeline: before one’s first graduate degree and during one’s career. I first consider individuals whose undergraduate degrees are in STEM but whose first graduate degrees are in non-STEM fields, and I show how men’s and women’s predicted attrition probabilities vary by field and birth cohort. While men in the early birth cohorts are more likely to receive first graduate degrees in non-STEM than women, this trend steadily reverses itself over successive birth cohorts. By the 1976-1981 birth cohort, women are more likely than men to leave STEM and pursue non-STEM graduate degrees regardless of undergraduate field. When considering exits from STEM during one’s career, I estimate the size of women’s excess exits from different STEM disciplines relative to non-STEM fields and identify key reasons for these exits in each field. I find that disaggregating science into mathematics, life sciences, and physical sciences; and engineering into computer science and other engineering fields reveals patterns in attrition that are otherwise masked. In the life sciences, the gender gap in exits is substantially smaller than the gap in exits from non-STEM. I also find evidence of excess exits in computer science and other engineering fields. In computer science and engineering, although exits are driven primarily by pay and promotion, these are larger factors in computer science than in other engineering fields

 Media

Classwork featured in Bloomberg [Link] [My Version] [TV Interview]