Research

Working Papers:

Job Market Paper

This study investigates whether helping colleagues in a competitive work environment can be strategically used as a signal of one's ability and how others respond. A novel real-effort lab experiment was conducted where two workers compete for one position and one worker can help the other at a cost. Two treatments, Signal and Baseline, vary in the timing of whether the helping decisions are observed before or after employers make hiring decisions. The findings show that workers indeed help their competitors to signal their abilities. Employers can recognize this signal and are more likely to hire those who help. Remarkably, no matter whether the help harms the recipient's prospect of being hired, those who provide the help are equally likely to be rewarded by the competing worker. This study provides insights into how strategic motives encourage employees to help their colleagues, even in competitive work environments.

Ethnic Salience and Discrimination (with Zahra Murad, Emel Öztürk , Sigrid Suetens), pre-registered as here

We report the results of three controlled experiments in which participants belonging to an ethnic majority group made choices that affected the payoff of another (``vulnerable'') participant who was either a member of the majority group or an ethnic minority group. Each of the experiments consisted of several experimental waves that varied in the extent to which issues related to ethnicity were salient to the decision makers. The variation in ethnic salience was the result of the differential timing of the experimental waves, and, in one of the experiments, was also the result of varying the information provided about the vulnerable participant's ethnic background. Across all three experiments, decision makers behaved more generously towards participants with a minority background in waves with high ethnic salience, while behavior towards participants from the majority was unaffected. Evidence is provided that the mechanism behind this result involves social desirability bias.

Work in Progress:

Other-regarding Ethnic Preferences (with Sigrid Suetens), pre-registered as here

We study whether other-regarding preferences of the majority population in Germany and the Netherlands depend on the ethnic background of others. To do so, we ran large-scale controlled experiments among the general majority population in both countries. The participants' main task was to make a series of choices on allocating money between themselves and another participant, or between two other participants. Part of the decision-makers were matched with others who also belonged to the majority population, and another part of the decision-makers were matched with others who belonged to an ethnic minority group. The choices were constructed with the purpose of structurally estimating the parameters of a utility function that allows for a variety of other-regarding preferences, including altruism, inequality aversion, spite, and welfare maximization. We find that, overall, none of the other-regarding preferences depends on the ethnic background of the other.

Predoctoral Publications:

Changrong Lu, Jiaxiang Li, & Yi Sheng. (2020). A study on the negative externality of USD liquidity-based on the asset allocation efficiency of US treasury securities. The Singapore Economic Review, 1-29. (link)