Working Papers

Paternalism & Discrimination

with Nina Buchmann and Colin Sullivan

Conditionally accepted, Econometrica

We combine two lab-in-the-field experiments in Bangladesh to study how other-regarding preferences can generate differential treatment. Specifically, we identify how paternalism leads employers to treat two groups differently in order to protect one group, even against its will, from situations they perceive as harmful or unpleasant in the hiring of female workers in Bangladesh. We refer to this as paternalistic discrimination. We observe hiring and application decisions for a night-shift job that provides worker transport at the end of the shift. In the first experiment, we use information about the transport to vary employers’ perceptions of job costs to female workers while holding taste-based and statistical discrimination constant: Not informing employers about the transport decreases demand for female labor by 22%. Employers respond more to transport information than cash payments to female workers that enable workers to purchase transport themselves. In the second experiment, not informing applicants about the transport reduces female labor supply by 15%.

Media: IDEAS FOR INDIA, VoxDev, Econimate

Heterogeneous Trends of Animal Product Consumption in the US: Evidence from Grocery Purchase Data

with Zach Freitas-Groff and Trevor Woolley

Accepted, European Economic Review

Kilts Center at Chicago Booth Marketing Data Center Paper

Over the past two decades, U.S. meat consumption has remained high while purchases of plant-based alternatives have grown, raising questions about whether consumer behavior is shifting. Answering this question is difficult: survey measures may overstate meat avoidance because stated identities and reported behavior do not always align with purchases, including because of social-desirability concerns, and aggregated data obscure heterogeneity across households and regions. To address these challenges, we use a U.S. household grocery panel (2004–2020) linked with ingredient-level product data and develop a machine-learning-based classification of grocery purchases. We show that, despite modest growth in meat’s grocery-weight share, the share of screened household-months with no recorded meat grocery purchases rises from about 5.6% to about 7.5% by the end of 2019, and the share with no recorded animal-product grocery purchases rises from about 0.4% to about 1.2%, revealing growing polarization in grocery-purchase behavior. These increases partially reverse in 2020, when pandemic conditions shift consumption back toward food at home, consistent with declining food-at-home grocery purchasing accounting for part of the pre-pandemic rise in non-purchasing. Heterogeneity across demographic groups is consistent with cohort and demographic composition contributing to these patterns, though the grocery panel cannot cleanly separate composition, food-away-from-home substitution, and within-household behavior. By contrast, the extensive-margin patterns begin before modern plant-based meat alternatives (PBMAs) become prominent; PBMA spending shares are too small to account mechanically for much of aggregate meat-purchase changes, and their timing and limited penetration make them unlikely to explain the broader non-purchasing patterns on their own. Our findings reconcile persistently high aggregate meat consumption with the increasing visibility of meat avoidance.

Media: Vox

The Misallocation of High-Value Work
with Germán Reyes and Jason Somerville

Aggregate productivity depends on whether productive inputs are allocated to their highest-value uses. We document a novel form of misallocation within a single individual performing a cognitively demanding task over time. In an online experiment, participants complete a 30-question mathematics exam with random question order and randomly timed enhanced incentives (“bonus boosts”). Performance falls by 9.5 percentage points from the first to the last question, and 82 percent of participants exhibit a decline. Yet 58.0 percent of participants report no preference over when to receive bonus boosts, and willingness to pay for these boosts does not differ significantly across timing options. This indifference is costly: assigning boosts early rather than late raises expected bonus earnings by 9 percent. The misallocation aligns with miscalibrated beliefs about productivity: pre-exam forecasts imply constant performance, and post-exam hindcasts capture only 55 percent of the actual decline. These findings identify miscalibrated beliefs about within-worker productivity trajectories as an under-recognized source of misallocation.

Work in Progress

The Impact of Salary Ranges with Adrian Blattner and Mariana Guido

Flexibility through Delay with Hunt Allcott, Matthew Gentzkow, Peter Maxted, and Lena Song

AI Uncertainty and Career Choices with Nora Lorenz