Research areas and output

Working Papers

The Leaky Pipeline: When Career Expectations Meet Social Norms (with V. Asri)

Traditional gender norms continue to limit women’s labor force participation in developing countries despite rising education levels. A school-based career exploration program in urban India was found to increase students’ expectations that women will work after childbearing and reduce concerns about marital conflict, suggesting its potential to challenge restrictive gender roles. 

Working Paper, Resubmitted to Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (last version: December 2025) 

Building Bridges or Walls? The Dynamics of Cooperation in Diverse Societies

This paper examines the emergence of cooperation in heterogeneous societies, where individuals trade off coordination within their own group against cooperation across groups. I introduce a novel dynamic coordination model in which majority and minority group members pre-commit either to their group norm or to a costly bridging action enabling cross-group interaction. The model generates four self-enforcing social conventions, mutual cooperation, mutual non-cooperation, and two asymmetric conventions, and yields new predictions for when efficient cross-group cooperation is unstable. Asymmetries in group size and coordination incentives can make mutual cooperation unstable and generate persistent inequality even when cooperation is Pareto superior. A laboratory experiment with induced group identities supports these predictions: societies often converge to non-cooperation, and when cooperation arises, it is disproportionately undertaken by minorities, earning lower payoffs and unrealized efficiency gains. Together, the theory and experiment show that within-group coordination pressures can endogenously produce inefficient and unequal social norms, with persistent inter-group disparities in otherwise mutually beneficial environments.

Working Paper, Under review (last version: February 2026) 

Inequality of Opportunity and Discrimination (with Deepti Bhatia and Urs Fischbacher)

Identity-based discrimination continues to impact labor market outcomes across multiple contexts. While explicit forms of discrimination have been mitigated through policy and institutional interventions, subtle mechanisms persist. For instance, differential access to resources can lead to disparities in performance, potentially masking underlying biases. We investigate whether inequality of opportunity influences discrimination through a laboratory experiment in India, focusing on caste-based discrimination and belief updating. We introduce inequality of opportunity by exogenously varying the degree of advantage in a previously performed task. We test whether providing information about an advantage affects the likelihood of hiring potential employees across groups and whether employers update their beliefs over time. Our results indicate that, conditional on being informed about the advantages, employers initially prefer employees from their own caste. Over time, they update their beliefs about the true ability distribution, leading to statistical discrimination in favor of upper-caste employees.

Working paper available upon request, Revise & Resubmit at Journal of Economic Psychology 

Helping the kids to catch up: What predicts foundational learning in urban India? 

Many children in developing countries lack fundamental numeracy and literacy skills. No-detention policies imply that children are automatically promoted to the next higher grade regardless of their learning. A potential risk is that children who lack foundational skills lag and cannot follow the content being taught in the classroom. NGOs try to address this by providing remedial programs, especially for children from poorer backgrounds. We collaborate with an NGO in urban India that implements a low-cost program following the Japanese Kumon model in which students complete worksheets that slowly increase in difficulty. We examine the predictors of learning progression and student engagement using administrative data to measure learning and engagement, and survey data of parents and NGO teachers. Our results show that students with mothers who have completed at least secondary education have a higher learning progression and more frequent engagement. In comparison, students with fathers who have completed at least secondary education have a lower learning progression and less frequent engagement. Further, the teacher employed by the NGO is the most important predictor for both outcomes. Our empirical findings highlight that it is crucial to actively engage fathers in outreach activities and invest in the teachers' training and monitoring to improve learning progression and student engagement for all students. 

Status: Addressing the reviewer's comments after a rejection 

Working paper available upon request

Work in Progress

Affirmative Action: Efficiency and inequality (with Urs Fischbacher, Jan Hausfeld, and Yvette Lambi)

Using a lab experiment, we examine how different affirmative action institutions based on identity and wealth status affect the inequality, efficiency, and intergroup relations between players belonging to different groups. 

Status: Writing the first draft

Evolution of Preferences in a Culturally Diverse Society: A Field Experiment (with V. Asri)

Status: Design and planning stage

Do they want me here? Native attitudes towards diversity and the cultural distinction of immigrants

I investigate the empirical relationship between the acculturation patterns of immigrants and the attitudes of natives toward cultural diversity. Using data from the European Social Survey, I find that when natives believe the presence of immigrants enriches the cultural life of the country, immigrants tend to conform to the natives' belief systems, such as trust levels and gender attitudes, while maintaining their cultural practices, such as continuing to speak their home language. These findings have important policy implications, such as teaching the importance of diversity in schools and considering the importance of natives' attitudes towards diversity when designing integration policies for immigrants. 

Status: Addressing the reviewer's comments after a rejection