Working papers

Female Entrepreneurship and Trust in the Market,  with N. Ashraf (LSE), E. Glaeser (Harvard) and Kim Sarnoff (Princeton)

Revise and resubmit at the Journal of Political Economy

NBER Working Paper 26366

Commerce requires trust, but trust is difficult when one group can expropriate another using violence or social power. We present a model of entrepreneurship that predicts female businesses will interact with men only when external authorities enforce contracts fairly, and when social norms empower female bargaining. The model’s predictions are supported in cross-national data and with a new census of Zambian manufacturers. In Zambia, female entrepreneurs collaborate less, learn less from fellow entrepreneurs, earn less, and segregate into low-return industries with more women. By experimentally inducing variation in institutional quality in an adapted investment game, we find that unbiased adjudication reduces the gender gap in trust and economic activity, resulting in economic benefits for both men and women.

Learning to See the World’s Opportunities: Memory, Mental Experiencing and the Economic Lives of the Vulnerable 

with N. Ashraf (LSE), G. Bryan (LSE), E. Holmes (Karolinska Institutet), L. Iacovone (WB), C. Meyer (Oxford) and A. Pople (WB)

New draft coming soon!

Work in neuroscience and psychology has underscored the role of mental experiencing for decision making. Using the same senses that we use to perceive the world and to remember the past, mental experiencing enables us to compare the consequences of our actions in different settings, and facilitates mental scenario simulations with vividness, specificity and emotions. Trauma affects our memory and thus may impede our ability to use mental experiencing effectively. We measure the quality of mental experiencing, and evaluate how it impacts economic outcomes through two randomized controlled trials with vulnerable populations that have suffered trauma and violence. In a sample of refugees in Ethiopia, learning to generate positive mental experiences related to the host economy leads to increased intentions to stay, more economic activity, and improved wellbeing. In Colombia, we embed controlled mental experiencing within an entrepreneurship program to explore whether this ability may enhance its effectiveness. We compare outcomes of standard business training, business training with mental experiencing, and no training. Participants in the standard business training see declines in both mental experiencing and earnings compared to the no intervention group. These negative effects disappear in the mental experiencing arm. The highest gains from improved mental experiencing accrue to the most vulnerable and traumatized participants in the sample, highlighting the need for trauma-informed programs.

Funding: IPA P&R Exploratory Grant, IGA-Rockefeller Research and Impact Fund, J-PAL PPE, IPA P&R, J-PAL GEA

Value Misalignment at the Workplace, with M. Espinosa (Bocconi)

New draft coming soon!

We conduct a large-scale survey with a global bank to measure workers' personal values and investigate their power to explain worker-level productivity. Using granular organizational data, we construct measures of workers' value misalignment with their teammates and their boss. We show that workers who have different values than their colleagues and than their managers perform worse than those who have similar values. This negative effect is stronger and robust for value misalignment with bosses and in hard productivity measures. Exploratory evidence suggests that value misalignment hinders workers' motivation and increases managers' difficulties in coordinating employees. However, teams with improved and frequent communication can better mitigate the challenges arising from divergent values.

Research in progress

• Beyond bonuses: the incentive effect of a prosocial initiative on bankers (analysis)

with N. Ashraf (LSE), O. Bandiera (LSE) and M. Fossi (LSE)

• Unwilling to reskill? Evidence from a survey experiment with Italian jobseekers (analysis)

with R. Sadun (HBS), S. Inferrera (Queen Mary), A. Garnero (OECD) and M.

Leonardi (Statale di Milano)

• Encouraging hands-on job experimentation among teenagers: evidence from Switzerland (data collection)

with A. Brenoe (UZH), C. Schilter (Bern) and S. Wolter (Bern)

• Friendly workplaces for working mothers: Experimental evidence on encouraging the creation of lactation rooms in Kenya (data collection)

with S. Fiorin (Bocconi)

Funding: J-PAL GEA, Weiss Fund, LEAP

• Gender and the demand and supply of advice in teams (analysis)

with Shan Aman-Rana (University of Virginia) and Shamyla Chaudry (Lahore School of Economics)