Research

Working Papers

Fickle Discrimination: Evidence From Emergency Triage Decisions (Job Market Paper)

Presentations: SITE Economics of Health Inequality, Princeton University (SWEET), University of Pittsburgh, ESA World Meeting  

Abstract: Group disparities are typically treated as stable, reflecting decision-makers' persistent beliefs or preferences. I show instead that they are fickle: holding the decision-maker and decision problem fixed, transitory features of the immediate decision context unrelated to the current case systematically shift the size of disparities and even which group is disadvantaged. In 2 million emergency department triage decisions, non-White patients are 5.4 percentage points (21%) less likely than observably identical White patients to receive top priority from the same nurse in the same shift. Two contextual features—which patients a nurse was just exposed to and how much time she has to decide—explain more than half of this gap. I isolate exposure using "frequent flyers," disproportionately non-White, lower-risk repeat patients. Exploiting quasi-random arrivals and nurse assignment, I find these encounters sharply lower assigned priority for subsequent same-race patients, consistent with reliance on coarse similarity. This race-risk association is shaped by frequent flyers a nurse happens to encounter over time: within nurse, greater prior-year non-White exposure monotonically widens the gap, while greater White exposure narrows and ultimately reverses it (-3.6 pp). Time pressure reduces information collection and doubles exposure effects, consistent with substituting similarity for individualized assessment. Racially imbalanced exposure produces a net non-White disadvantage. These effects persist against a race-blind machine-learning benchmark and extend to downstream care: after an encounter, same-race patients' relative hospital admission rate falls 3.0 pp (26%). Seemingly entrenched disparities may be more malleable than assumed, responding to institutional choices about case assignment and decision time.

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.

Publications

Please Take a Minute: How Prosocial Choices Change with Deliberation 

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

Accepted, American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

Measuring Discrimination with Experiments 

(with Corinne Low)

Handbook of Experimental Methods in the Social Sciences, edited by Alex Rees-Jones, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, 2026. 

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.  

Selected Work in Progress

The Glass Cliff: Leadership Selection During Crises 

Reducing Avoidable Emergency Department Use: A Field Experiment