Research

Working Papers

Under Pressure: Time Constraints and Group Disparities (Job Market Paper)

Abstract: Differential treatment based on group characteristics remains ubiquitous. This paper shows that situational constraints—rather than underlying preferences or beliefs—are a central driver of unequal treatment, using evidence from the high-stakes field setting of emergency department (ED) triage. Drawing on rich administrative data covering nearly 2 million triage decisions, I first document a large baseline racial gap: non-White patients are 5.4 pp (27 percent) less likely than otherwise identical White patients to receive the most urgent triage classification. Exploiting quasi-random, minute-to-minute variation in time pressure, I show that this gap widens dramatically when nurses are rushed. Under greater time pressure, nurses spend less time assessing patients, collect fewer diagnostic signals, and rely more on race-based heuristics; these constraint-induced changes account for at least 20 percent of the observed racial triage gap. Recent experience that associates non-White patients with lower severity amplifies the gap, while opposite experience attenuates or even reverses it, helping to explain why disparities grow when individualized information is scarce. Time pressure-induced distortions are associated with larger downstream racial disparities in wait times, diagnostic assessments, treatments, and permanent health consequences, including for high-risk, time-sensitive conditions such as stroke. Together, the results show how acute constraints can amplify group-based disparities in high-stakes allocation decisions, highlighting the role of decision environments in generating unequal treatment and pointing to policy interventions that target constraints rather than decision-makers.

Gender Bias and Differential Belief Updating

Abstract: I study whether people respond differently to identically informative signals about men and women. To ensure signals convey identical information, I develop a novel experimental design that fully fixes both prior beliefs and signal distributions across gender. In an experiment with 3,204 subjects, individuals respond dramatically to the gender of the signal-sender. Subjects are more likely to violate Bayes’ Rule, failing to update or updating in the wrong direction, after learning a woman succeeded or a man failed. They update more rationally after learning a man succeeded or a woman failed. Additional treatments explore how to mitigate these gendered mistakes.

Please Take a Minute: How Prosocial Choices Change with Deliberation 

(with Judd B. Kessler, Hannu Kivimaki, and Muriel Niederle)

Revise and Resubmit, American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

Abstract: People often make decisions quickly when presented with a choice. Are their intuitive answers a good approximation of what they would choose if they took more time to decide? We explore how individuals' choices change with deliberation and find that later choices systematically differ from early ones. We focus on prosocial decisions and find that individuals' choices respond more to social efficiency as they deliberate over the course of a minute. Our results call into question the use of revealed preference for welfare when prosocial choices are made quickly and provide guidance to policy makers and charities.

Publications

Measuring Discrimination with Experiments 

(with Corinne Low)

In Handbook of Experimental Methods in the Social Sciences, edited by Alex Rees-Jones, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, forthcoming. 

A Conditional Cash Transfer and Women's Empowerment: Does Bolsa Familia Influence Intimate Partner Violence? 

(with Elizaveta Perova and Sarah Anne Reynolds)

Social Science and Medicine, 238 (112462), 2019.  

Work in Progress

The Glass Cliff: Leadership Selection During Crises 

Subjective Pain Signals and Worker Discretion: Evidence from Doctors  

Defaults, Response Time, and Preference Measurement