Working papers

Gender Diversity Improves Academic Performance 

This paper uses a field experiment in a first-semester course at a Swiss public university to examine the impact of gender diversity on academic performance. 2,580 students across six cohorts are randomly assigned into 645 study groups with varying gender composition. Results show that group gender diversity significantly raises students' course performance, especially for men. Moving from homogeneous to gender-balanced groups increases course grade by about 15% standard deviations. Analyses of mechanisms reveal that diversity enhances within-group social interaction, as well as students' self-esteem, self-confidence, mental health, and study effort. The findings of this paper highlight the value of gender diversity in improving academic performance and fostering social integration 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) 

We analyze data from two universities that allowed students to conceal grades from their transcripts during the Covid-19 pandemic. Across both institutions, we observe a significant and substantial gender concealment gap: women are less likely than men to conceal grades that would harm their GPA. We explore the robustness, drivers, and consequences of the concealment gap via rich data on student traits and course-level characteristics as well as complementary data from an experiment with real employers and a survey of impacted students. Our findings highlight how information-optional policies can create unexpected and potentially undesirable disparities.

Peers Affect Personality Development (with Ulf Zölitz) 

Revise & Resubmit, Review of Economics and Statistics

The Minority Trap: Minority Status Drives Women Out of Male-Dominated Fields

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)

Gender Differences in Salary Requests - Analysis in progress

(with Norihiko Matsuda)

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

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