Parental Investments in Early Childhood and the Gender Gap in Math and Literacy (with John A. List, Anya Samek, and Shreemayi Samujjwala).  2022. American Economic Association Papers & Proceedings 112, 603-608. 

Coverage: UC San Diego Today, ABC 10 News San Diego, Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, MSU Today 

The Impact of Oil and Gas Job Opportunities on Short and Long Term Human Capital. Southern Economic Journal. 2022. Data and replication files

Coverage: Fortune Magazine

Skills for the Future? A Life-Cycle Perspective on Systems of Vocational Education and Training (with Christian Ibsen). 2021. Industrial and Labor Relations Review 75(3), 638-664.

Do Financial Incentives Aimed at Decreasing Interhousehold Inequality Increase Intrahousehold Inequality? (with John List and Anya Samek). 2021. Journal of Public Economics 196, 104382.

A Field Study of Charitable Giving Reveals that Reciprocity Decays over Time (with Judd Kessler and Katherine Milkman). 2018. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115(8), 1766-1771.

Coverage: Scientific American, Knowledge@Wharton Radio

“Feel the Warmth” Glow: A Field Experiment on Manipulating the Act of Giving (with Anya Savikhin Samek). 2014. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 108, 198-211. 

Coverage: The New York Times

Non-College Occupations, Workplace Routinization, and the College Enrollment of Women (with Weilong Zhang).  

We evaluate the impact of routinization from 1960 to 2000 on college enrollment. Among non-college workers, routine occupations employed a substantial share of the female workforce, but this share plummeted from 1970 on. Using shift-share instruments, we show that routinization displaced women’s non-college occupations, raising female enrollment. In contrast, men's non-college occupations were less vulnerable, leaving their enrollment rates largely unaffected. Embedding this instrumental variation into a Roy model explains the mechanisms behind these results. Gender differences in skill create a comparative advantage in manual work for non-college men, leaving women to sort into routine jobs, which were more vulnerable to routinization. Routinization then displaced these jobs, raising the college premium more for women than for men.

Pay It Forward: Theory and Experiment (with Hanzhe Zhang). Online Appendix. Third round revision requested at Games and Economic Behavior.

We theoretically and experimentally investigate psychological motivations behind pay-it-forward behavior. We construct a psychological game-theoretic model that incorporates altruism, inequity aversion, and indirect reciprocity following Rabin (1993), Fehr and Schmidt (1999), and Dufwenberg and Kirchsteiger (2004). We test this model using games in which players choose to give to strangers, potentially after receiving a gift from an unrelated benefactor. Our experiment reveals that altruism and indirect reciprocity spur people to pay kind actions forward, informing how kindness begets further kindness. However, inequity aversion hinders giving even when giving will allow one’s kindness to be paid forward. Our paper informs how kind behaviors get passed on among parties that never directly interact, which has implications for the formation of social norms and behavioral conduct within workplaces, neighborhoods, and communities.

Evaluating the Impact of Preschool on Patience, Time Inconsistency and Commitment Demand (with Anya Samek and Shreemayi Samujjwala). 

We evaluate patience, time inconsistency and commitment demand among children. We first show that patience at ages 5-10 predicts reading scores up to 4 years later, even after controlling for prior cognition and executive function. Time inconsistency and commitment demand do not predict reading scores. Second, we evaluate whether preschool affects patience. We leverage a field experiment that randomized children to different preschool curricula. We find that the preschool curriculum focused on self- regulation improved patience overall relative to the control group. Further, preschool helps children use commitment devices to manage their time inconsistency, but does not affect time inconsistency directly.

How do Unions Raise Wages? Evidence from Danish Employer-Employee Linked Data (with Jens Arnholtz and Christian Ibsen). 

Using the population of Danish employer-employee linkages, this paper offers the first empirical study to differentiate between three different mechanisms of the union wage premium that are often conflated in the literature: bargaining coverage, individual union membership and workplace union density. The longitudinal data enable us to exploit within-worker variation in wages over time, accounting for unobservable individual- and firm-level heterogeneity. Our results suggest that all three mechanisms produce wage premiums. However, the premiums depend on the degree of centralization in wage setting. The bargaining coverage mechanism is more important when collective agreements centrally set wages, while individual union membership is more important in contexts where wage-setting is more decentralized. By exploring the fundamental channels behind how unions raise wages, our study deepens understanding regarding the effects found in prior work.

DEI Statements can Active Stereotype Threat: Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment (with Andrew S. Johnson).

We explore how DEI statements impact college students. We randomly assign 3,825 incoming freshmen to receive emails that include or exclude a DEI statement. We find that the DEI statement reduces student interest in academic resources by 50%, with greater declines for men than women. 12 weeks later, Black and Hispanic students report greater rates of worry regarding stereotypes, but not White and Asian students. Finally, transcript data indicate that the DEI statements reduce GPAs for men. Potential mechanisms include greater disengagement in university resources among men. Our results suggest that organizations should empirically test DEI statements before implementing them.

Young Children are Sensitive to Moral Costs: Experimental Evidence from Dictator Games (with James C. Cox, John A. List, Michael Price, Vjollca Sadiraj, and Anya Samek).

Many studies have explored how prosocial preferences develop among children, finding that generosity develops surprisingly early in life. Researchers typically attribute this finding to humankind’s innate desire to help others. More recently, research has identified another reason for generosity – individuals wish to avoid the moral cost of behaving selfishly. We use dictator games with 3–7-year-old subjects to show that this sensitivity to moral cost emerges early in life. We find that as early as 3 years old, children are sensitive to moral costs: when we adjust the reference point for moral behavior by allowing them to take from others, they give significantly less. Our findings reveal that children act based on moral costs prior to formal socialization in school, which suggests that preferences for generosity develop based on innate understanding or norms internalized from the early home environment.