Working papers

Gender Diversity Improves Academic Performance 

Is gender diversity beneficial for students? I conduct a field experiment in a Swiss university where 2,580 students are randomly assigned to 645 study groups. Results show that group gender diversity significantly improves academic performance, particularly for men. Transitioning from homogeneous to gender-balanced groups raises final grades by about 15% standard deviations. Exploring the mechanisms, I find that students in more-diverse groups have increased social interactions and improved overall well-being. Diversity also leads students to adopt more traditional gender attitudes, especially for women. This paper highlights the benefits of gender diversity for students’ performance and well-being in higher education.

Information-Optional Policies and the Gender Concealment Gap (with Christine Exley, Raymond Fisman, Judd Kessler, Louis-Pierre Lepage, Corinne Low, Xiaomeng Li, Mattie Toma, and Basit Zafar) 

Peers Affect Personality Development (with Ulf Zölitz) 

Revise & Resubmit, Review of Economics and Statistics

Publications

Lowering the Playing Field: Discrimination through Sequential Spillover Effects (with Judd Kessler and Corinne Low)

Forthcoming, Review of Economics and Statistics

Access to Pensions, Old-Age Support, and Child Investment in China (with Albert Park)

Forthcoming, Journal of Human Resources 

Selected work in progress

Social Learners: The Disproportionate Impact of Online Instruction on Women - Draft coming soon

(with Ulf Zölitz and Uschi Backes-Gellner)

Early Childhood Investment and Parental Well-Being - Fieldwork in progress

(with Victoria Baranov, Pietro Biroli, and Anne Brenøe)

Gender Differences in Salary Requests - Analysis in progress

(with Norihiko Matsuda)