"Stereotypical Selection"
Winner of ISWE Prize at the IEA Conference 2023
[Latest draft: link. Trinity Economic Papers: link]
Women are still under-represented and struggling to establish careers in traditionally male-dominated fields. Does minority status in and of itself create a barrier to women's success? Experiments suggest that under-representation exacerbates the detrimental effect of the negative stereotypes that often characterize women's ability in these fields. However, in real-world environments, these results might not hold. While lab experiments typically shut down the selection channel altogether, the choice to enter male-dominated fields is endogenous, and may in part be motivated by challenging these stereotypes. This paper assesses how minority status affects performance when selection is endogenous by studying the performance of 14,000 students at an elite university across 16 departments, in a real-world setting that combines a choice with well-defined stereotypes - university major - with exogenous variation in peer identity - quasi-random allocation of students across class groups within the same course. The evidence indicates that those who go against stereotypes (e.g. women in math) do not suffer from being in the minority, but they impose negative externalities on those who select on stereotypes (e.g. men in math). In line with social identity considerations being incorporated into educational choices, the evidence points towards ex-ante "sensitivity" to social norms and preferences to engage with same-gender peers inducing students to select different majors and then reacting to the composition of the environment in a self-fulfilling way.
"Learning about Women's Competence: the Dynamic Response of Political Parties to Gender Quotas in South Korea" (with Jay Euijung Lee)
Revise & Resubmit, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy
[Latest draft: link. CEP Discussion paper: link]
Coverage: LSE Inequalities, CentrePiece
Funding: STICERD Research Grant, French National Research Agency Grant "Investissements d'Avenir"
Despite their broad usage, gender quotas in politics are not a one-size-fits-all solution. In countries with conservative gender norms, quotas are arguably most needed but face a high risk of being ineffective if not designed appropriately. In this paper, we study the dynamic responses of political parties to gender quotas in South Korean municipal councils, a setting with nearly zero women pre-quota. Our empirical strategy exploits three unique features of the setting: (i) the quota intensity is discontinuous at given cut-offs of council size; (ii) quotas are implemented in only one of two independent election arms, allowing for adjustment in the other arm; (iii) we can follow parties over fifteen years. Political parties initially circumvent the quota by nominating fewer women in the unregulated arm, but gradually reverse this response over time. By exploiting the evolution of the rich set of endogenous party responses in the unregulated arm, we test the predictions of a dynamic model of discrimination. We pin down statistical discrimination with incorrect beliefs about women's competence as the main reason why parties initially select a suboptimally low number of women. The quota allows parties to gradually revise their beliefs after exposure to competent women.
"Strategic Confidence? The Gender Confidence Gap and Anticipated Discrimination in Economics Peer-Review" (with Margaret Samahita)
Reject & Resubmit, Journal of Human Resources
Previously circulated as “Confident, but undervalued: Evidence from The Irish Economics Association Annual Conference"
[Latest draft: link. Trinity Economic Papers: link. UCD Centre for Economic Research Working Paper: link]
This paper examines gender differences in stated confidence in a novel and consequential setting -- the peer review of academic conference submissions. Contrary to expectations, female reviewers report higher confidence than males. Results suggest that stated confidence is context-dependent and may be strategically used by women in response to anticipated bias. This behavior reflects a rational response to the undervaluation of their expertise: organizers’ decisions tend to align more closely with male reviewers’ recommendations, even if female reviewers’ evaluations are more predictive of actual paper quality.
"Group Composition and Group Decision-Making: Evidence from Municipal Council Meetings in South Korea" (with Jay Euijung Lee and Minhyuk Nam)
Funding: STICERD Research Grant, TCD Arts and Social Sciences Benefactions Fund
[Draft available upon request]
Does having a seat at the table translate into influence in the decision-making process? In this paper, we study how group interactions change when quotas introduce females into South Korean municipal councils, shocking a status quo where women were nearly completely absent. Our key contribution is that we can study how group composition affects dynamics in a setting outside the lab with real consequences, by analyzing rich transcripts of data spanning >250,000 meetings, and by tracking the behavior of a councilor over 4 years of their term within the same group of councilors. Preliminary findings show that women introduced by quotas start out their term much less vocal than men, even when compared to rookie men equally lacking councilor experience. However, the gap between rookie men and rookie women nearly fully closes by the end of the term, suggesting that it is not differences in inherent talent that cause women to be less vocal and that rookie women gradually gain influence as councilors work together during the years.
N.B. This paper constitutes the first step of a more ambitious initiative: to dissect the mechanisms behind how greater female representation in politics changes policy outcomes, focusing our field of vision on the decision-making process.
"Automation, Unemployment and Re-envisioning the Nature of Work" (with Nava Ashraf, Oriana Bandiera, and Virginia Minni)
Funding: Nuffield Foundation Grant
Policy Report: link
[Pilot in progress]
Reskilling workers is a crucial challenge for both firms and governments in the face of technological advances in AI and robotics. However, effectively transitioning workers to other sectors involves cultivating a growth mindset, promoting ongoing learning and adaptability. In collaboration with a global consumer goods firm, we develop and test a program designed to reskill blue-collar workers by nurturing a growth mindset.
“Working together: Gender segregation across firms” (joint with Louisa Roos)
[Descriptive analysis undergoing]
Despite the mounting support for workplace diversity and the more developed understanding of the benefits for both equality and productivity, most economies exhibit stark gender segregation across industries, occupations, and firms. Whilst segregation along industry and occupational lines has garnered much attention, gender segregation across firms within industries remains poorly understood. Studies that have looked at this phenomenon have shown that workplace gender composition affects wages and satisfaction in the workplace. However, it remains unclear how much of this relationship can be attributed to different types of people self-selecting into firms with a higher share of same-gender peers. If workplace gender composition is internalized in occupational choices, different gender representation might bring along a different workforce composition, with implications for workplace dynamics and employees’ outcomes. In this paper, we study this question by leveraging a matched employer-employee dataset representative of the universe of firms in Switzerland between 1994 and 2021 and the cross-sectional heterogeneity in the density of firms within by sector/occupation across locations to identify self-selection.