The Effect of Rankings on Product and Talent Acquisition: Evidence from Higher Education (Job Market Paper)

Product rankings are designed to reflect the current product qualities available in the market. In this study, we demonstrate that rankings not only reflect current product qualities, but can also shape and reinforce the vertical quality of future products. We examine this phenomenon in the context of college rankings and research production—an especially important context given the ongoing public debate over whether college rankings truly correspond to meaningful school characteristics. Despite this debate, our findings reveal a growing disparity between top and lower-ranked institutions. Using a deep-learning method to quantify research quality, we find that a one-rank improvement leads to significant gains, increasing research quality by approximately 0.04 standard deviations of our quality metric. We argue a key driver of this effect is the institution's ability to attract top-tier and promising researchers, who use college rankings as a factor in their college-affiliation decisions. These findings highlight the importance of considering the long-term impact on product quality when assessing the influence of rankings on firm outcomes.

Does the Content of Managerial Responses to Consumer Reviews Affect Consumer Behavior?  (Email for Draft)

Joint with Sridhar Narayanan (Stanford University) and Giorgos Zervas (Boston University)

Online review platforms such as Yelp and TripAdvisor have seen remarkable usage growth in recent years. Consumers rely on these platforms for information about businesses in diverse sectors such as hospitality, retail, and services. Many of these platforms allow businesses to respond to consumer reviews, and these responses are typically visible to subsequent visitors to the platform. Recent literature in marketing has studied the impact of businesses responding to consumer reviews on subsequent consumer evaluations. In this paper, we explore the effect of the content of managerial responses to hotel reviews on evaluations by subsequent visitors to the review platform. Our identification strategy exploits the quasi-random allocation of responses to respondents. We find that tailored, more detailed responses lead to reviews with higher ratings. Furthermore, these responses systematically shift the textual content of new reviews.

Breaking Down Information Inequality: Evidence from a Field Experiment in the Technology Industry

Joint with Jung Ho Choi (Stanford University) and Adina Sterling (Columbia University)

The under-representation of women within the high-tech sector is well-recognized. Platforms that match buyers and sellers in labor markets have been proposed as a means of increasing women’s participation in high-tech. In this study, we conduct a randomized field experiment on a professional job search platform, allowing us to investigate how gender-specific information provided by the platform increases women’s engagement in searching for jobs in the tech industry. The inclusion of gender-specific, disaggregated information versus non-gendered aggregated information diminishes user engagement on the platform for all gender groups. However, further analyses of the experimental data suggest the benefit of gender-specific information for women’s search behavior. To study this underlying mechanism, we conduct a follow-on survey and find that women exhibit a relatively heightened interest in gender-specific, disaggregated job market information. Overall, our study suggests a nuanced perspective on the informational value of gender-specific data in the job search context.

Inclusivity in Recruitment Advertising (Email for Draft)

Joint with Wesley Hartmann (Stanford University) and Latika Chaudhary (Naval Postgraduate School)

This paper considers the effects of including a protagonist from an under-represented identity in advertising.  Our focus is military recruitment advertising where enlistment shares of women are 1/6, but the share of ad impressions with female protagonists extensively varies from zero to more than 90 percent.  Our analysis reveals that ads including a female protagonist are more effective for both female and male enlistment.  Next, we let the data reveal when advertising is excluding, inclusive or over-representative of an identity based on reactions to its representation in the annual aggregate of advertising impressions.  When less than 1/5 of impressions include female protagonists, enlistment is lower for both genders and increasing in that share.  Enlistment falls again when the share of impressions with female protagonists increases beyond 1/3.  Overall the results suggest there is a non-reactive range of inclusion in advertising but that under and over-representation in the annual ad impressions is penalized.  In our context, the non-reactive range is at, or just above, the observed representation of enlisted women. 

The Role of the Labor Market in Meeting Changes to the Consumer Profile (Email for Draft)

This study explores the interplay between consumer profile shifts and product offerings, emphasizing the role of available labor in shaping these offerings. We do so in the particularly high-stakes context of higher education. As colleges work hard to diversify their student bodies, a significant factor influencing their ability to adapt their educational product is the diversity and skill set of their faculty. Existing literature underscores the positive impact on student learning outcomes when teachers share the same demographic identity as their students, a factor especially crucial for underrepresented minority groups. Our research focuses on the extent to which faculty employment patterns are responsive to changes in student demographics.  We find that for every 1% increase in Black student enrollment share, there is a corresponding 0.2 to 0.3% increase in Black contingent faculty share. This positive yet non-proportional relationship highlights a potential mismatch between student diversity and the availability of identity-congruent teachers. This mismatch suggests that colleges may face challenges in fully aligning their educational offerings with potential increases to the diversity of their student body, which could have  implications for student learning experiences and outcomes.