We document a new way that discrimination operates: through sequential spillover effects. Employers in an incentivized resume rating experiment evaluate a sequence of hypothetical candidates with randomly assigned characteristics. Candidates are rated worse when following white men than when following women or minorities. Exploring the mechanisms, we find that spillover effects are inversely related to direct bias. When reviewing high-quality resumes or recruiting in STEM industries, employers directly favor white men and display no spillover effect. For low-quality resumes or non-STEM industries, we find no direct bias but a strong spillover effect. Results suggest that discrimination arises in subtle ways.

Do people around us influence our personality? We investigate this question through a field experiment where we randomly assign university students to study groups. We find personality spillovers along three dimensions: students become more conscientious when assigned to conscientious peers, more open-minded when assigned to open-minded peers, and more competitive when assigned to competitive peers. We find no effects for peers' extraversion, agreeableness, or neuroticism. Our findings are consistent with students' adopting peer traits that are predictive of academic achievement. Our paper provides novel evidence on spillovers in noncognitive skills and establishes that socialization with peers affects personality development.

This paper studies how access to public pensions affects old-age support and child investment in traditional societies. Guided by predictions from an overlapping generations model, we analyze the influences of a new pension program in rural China, using a difference-in-differences approach. We find that the program crowds out transfers from working-age adults, especially men, to their elderly parents. Interestingly, the impact on child investment significantly differs by child gender. While adult parents increase educational investment in sons, their investment in daughters appears to decrease. Our findings highlight the unintended consequences of public pensions on parental investment.

This paper examines the impact of group gender diversity on academic performance through a multi-year experiment involving 3,060 university students randomly assigned to 765 study groups. Students assigned to mixed-gender groups achieve higher grades in contemporaneous and subsequent courses and exhibit lower dropout rates than those in homogeneous groups. Unlike diversity in ability or nationality, gender diversity uniquely benefits the lowest-performing group member and reduces the within-group performance gap. Mechanism analyses show that gender diversity facilitates peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, improves students’ subjective well-being, and makes men more competitive. My findings highlight the value of gender-diverse peer groups in higher education.

We study the impact of online instruction with a field experiment that randomly assigns 1,344 university students to different proportions of online and in-person lectures in multiple introductory courses. Increased online proportion leaves men’s exam performance unaffected but significantly lowers women’s performance, particularly in math-intensive courses. Online instruction also reduces women’s longer-run performance and increases their study dropout. Exploring the mechanisms, we find that women exposed to more online lectures report lower course satisfaction, greater difficulty in connecting with peers, and perceive instructors as less engaging. Our findings caution policymakers that shifting toward more online instruction may disproportionally harm women.

We analyze data from two universities that allowed students to replace letter grades with “credit” on their transcripts. We observe a significant and substantial gender concealment gap: women are significantly less likely than men to conceal grades that would harm their GPAs. This gap arises despite students’ knowledge of their exact letter grade before making concealment decisions. The gap is large and consistent across levels of student performance, student traits, and features of courses. It creates an important, and likely unintended, inequity: GPA gains from the grade-optional policy benefit men nearly 50% more than women.