Autumn 2025

Details: Female political representation has increased substantially in Sub-Saharan Africa over the past three decades, particularly within ministerial positions. While there is growing evidence from India and other regions that female politicians shape policy and health outcomes, we know very little about these dynamics in Africa, especially on the role of the women in the executive branch. In this session, I will outline my ongoing work exploring how female political leaders may influence child and maternal health outcomes. I will present key stylized facts, data sources, and preliminary empirical strategies, and open the floor for discussion.

Research Agenda

Details: Universities regularly cite on‐campus housing as a lever for improving student success, yet causal evidence on capacity expansions is limited. This paper uses a 17‐year panel of 1,211 U.S. four‐year colleges to estimate how increases in dormitory beds affect retention and graduation. Two complementary designs are employed: (i) institution‐level difference models exploit within‐college changes across the entire sample, and (ii) a curated difference‐in‐differences analysis compares adjacent cohorts around one-time expansions at large colleges. In difference models, large capacity increases have no effect on first-year retention but raise on-time graduation by 1-2.5 percentage points depending on expansion size. The binary design corroborates these findings, showing graduation gains and retention improvements where freshmen were not already housed. Analysis of subgroups, rents and spillovers suggest that effects primarily operate through a campus residence channel. Results indicate that alleviating housing bottlenecks both reduces immediate congestion and delivers cumulative benefits over the course of study.

Primary results

Details: This experiment uses three canonical games—the trust game (Berg et al. 1995), public goods game (Isaac & Walker 1998), and stag-hunt game (Van Huyck et al. 1990)—to examine a timely and policy-relevant question: what observable characteristics of immigrants affect trust from locals? Drawing on a representative sample in Luxembourg, one of the most diverse societies in the world, we analyze how trustors respond to varying trustee profiles defined by national origin, educational background, and indicators of cultural assimilation. The design also allows us to identify (i) which features of trustees increase perceived trustworthiness, (ii) which characteristics of trustors predict higher baseline trust, and (iii) how generalizable the diversity–trust relationship is beyond the Luxembourg context. By studying trust dynamics in this unique setting, our goal is to offer a conservative estimate (or lower bound) of how diversity may influence trust in other, less diverse societies.

Early stage ideas

Details: This study examines how local newspaper discourse shaped migration and economic outcomes during the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 in the United States. Using digitized historical newspapers from Chronicling America, I construct a novel county-level measure of anti-Chinese sentiment based on the frequency and context of exclusionary language. Linking this measure to individual census data from 1880 and 1900, I analyze how variation in local sentiment influenced the migration, occupational mobility, and wage trajectories of Chinese immigrants, as well as potential effects on the non-chinese population. By combining large-scale text analysis with linked historical microdata, this study provides evidence on the economic consequences of ethnic discrimination and the role of local media in shaping migration and labor market outcomes. 

Early stage idea

Details: This study investigates how rising temperatures affect the productivity and well-being of manual outdoor workers in India, focusing on participants of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) program. By combining administrative productivity records with detailed worker surveys and behavioral experiments, we aim to quantify the relationship between heat exposure and daily output, absenteeism, and self-reported health. The research also explores workers’ preferences for adaptation measures such as cooling technologies, schedule shifts, and worksite improvements, using a discrete choice experiment, and examines gender-differentiated effects linked to childcare and domestic responsibilities.

Development stage

Details: This paper studies the effects of tax incentives on firms’ choice between different types of innovation. I propose a simple theoretical model to explore how front-end (e.g., R&D tax credits) and back-end (e.g., patent boxes) tax incentives exert a differential impact across product and process innovation. The model predicts a positive effect of front-end tax incentives on both types of innovation, while the effect of back-end tax incentives is ambiguous. Next, I plan to test these model predictions and provide empirical evidence on these effects using data from the European Patent Office (EPO). I aim to show the differential impact of tax incentives because, when a tax incentive favours one type of innovation, this bias deters private investment in the other innovation type and distorts the allocation of innovation investment efforts. As a result, such differential impact across innovation types exacerbates the already suboptimal private investment in research and development (R&D) and reduces the overall welfare.

preliminary stage

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