Job Market Paper

Working Papers

What Jobs Come to Mind? Stereotypes about Fields of Study
(with John J. Conlon)
Abstract
We document that US freshmen hold systematic misperceptions about the relationship between college majors and occupations. Students stereotype fields of study, greatly exaggerating the likelihood that majors lead to their distinctive jobs (e.g., counselor for psychology, journalist for journalism). In an experiment, a light-touch intervention aimed at correcting these beliefs shifts which majors students expect to pursue. Students considering "risky" majors—ones with rare stereotypical careers and low-paying alternatives—exhibit stronger treatment effects, consistent with a stylized model of major choice. Finally, we present a model of belief formation in which stereotyping arises as a product of associative memory. The same model predicts—and the survey data confirm—that students also overestimate outcomes to the extent that they are rare, concentrated within particular majors, or held by people they are personally close to (their parents and other role models).
| PDF | Coverage
Econimate Video Summary

A Rosetta Stone for Human Capital
(with Justin Sandefur)
PDF | Coverage
The Economist

Work in Progress

Women's Urban Mobility Barriers: Evidence from Delhi's Free Public Transport Policy
(with Girija Borker and Gabriel Kreindler)

Publications

Texts Don't Nudge: An Adaptive Trial to Prevent the Spread of COVID-19 in India
(with Girija Bahety, Sebastian Bauhoff, and James Potter)
Journal of Development Economics (2021)
Abstract
We conduct an adaptive randomized controlled trial to evaluate the impact of a SMS-based information campaign on the adoption of social distancing and handwashing in rural Bihar, India, six months into the COVID-19 pandemic. We test 10 arms that vary in delivery timing and message framing, changing content to highlight gains or losses for either one's own family or community. We identify the optimal treatment separately for each targeted behavior by adaptively allocating shares across arms over 10 experimental rounds using exploration sampling. Based on phone surveys with nearly 4,000 households and using several elicitation methods, we do not find evidence of impact on knowledge or adoption of preventive health behavior, and our confidence intervals cannot rule out positive effects as large as 5.5 percentage points, or 16%. Our results suggest that SMS-based information campaigns may have limited efficacy after the initial phase of a pandemic.
| PDF | Replication Materials

The New Era of Unconditional Convergence
(with Arvind Subramanian and Justin Sandefur)
Journal of Development Economics (2021)
Abstract
The central fact that has motivated the empirics of economic growth—namely unconditional divergence—is no longer true and has not been so for decades. Across a range of data sources, poorer countries have in fact been catching up with richer ones, albeit slowly, since the mid-1990s. This new era of convergence does not stem primarily from growth moderation in the rich world but rather from accelerating growth in the developing world, which has simultaneously become remarkably less volatile and more persistent. Debates about a "middle-income trap" also appear anachronistic: middle-income countries have exhibited higher growth rates than all others since the mid-1980s.
| PDF | Replication Materials
Replication Data and Code | Figures from the Paper
| Coverage
Bloomberg (Noah Smith) | The Economist | The New York Times (Paul Krugman)

Teaching

Syllabus for my class on the economics of gender inequality
PDF

Other

Bangladesh Data Resources
Bangladesh Labor Force Survey 2016-17
Roshni Islam translated the 2016-17 questionnaire to English. The underlying data can be acquired by contacting the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics. For more details, visit this link.

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