Works in Progress and Working Papers
Compensation Structure and Firm Wage Premia
I investigate the compensation channels through which firm pay premia are constructed using a unique data set of compensation records at over 1600 US firms. I find that high-paying firms increase both base and variable incentive pay relative to their competitors. To understand why firms treat these two premia as complements, I embed a textbook optimal contract model into a matching framework where workers of heterogeneous ability pair with firms that differ by productivity. My model reveals that the sorting of higher ability workers to high productivity firms can explain why high paying firms simultaneously increase base and bonus pay relative to their competitors.
Resume Screening and Labor-Market Signaling Models
With Judd Kessler, Corinne Low, and Xiaoyue Shan
(Draft Available on Request)
Job candidates typically choose how much information they reveal to employers on resumes. Under plausible assumptions, traditional signaling models predict that employers will infer that candidates who omit information in a given category (e.g., GPA) are of the lowest type for that category. We collect 2,840 employer ratings of resumes from 71 employers in a two-year field experiment and find that employers do not always treat omitted information as proof that a candidate is a lowest-type. This behavior by employers allows low-types to meaningfully benefit by omitting information which runs contrary to the prediction of standard signaling models. For example, we estimate that an applicant with a B-Average GPA benefits more from omitting their GPA than they would from reporting a prestigious internship at a company like Google or Morgan Stanley. Overall, our results suggest that existing signaling models may not adequately describe settings where senders can strategically choose to omit information.
Elite Capture of Clean Water in Bangladesh
With Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak and Alexander Van Geen
(Draft Available on Request)
Fifty-seven million residents of Bangladesh consume well water with arsenic concentrations exceeding WHO safety standards - the largest documented poisoning of a population in history. This widespread contamination has been shown to harm long-term health, cognition, and earnings. In response, over 200,000 low-arsenic deep wells have been installed to address this public-health challenge. However, the spatial distribution of these deep wells does not maximize their accessibility to populations currently drinking contaminated water. We investigate the extent to which elite capture (i.e. preferential distribution of public goods to elites) explains the existing inefficiency in deep-well placement. Using a triple differences strategy, we show that deep wells are built closer to local politicians' households when their political party is in power nationally. We then design a model where a social planner who may treat elites preferentially decides to place deep wells. Using the model to estimate counter-factuals, we find that elite capture accounts for about a fifth (18%) of current inefficiency in deep well placement.
Agents and The Gender Gap in Negotiations
With Jeanna Kenney
(Draft Available on Request)
Gender gaps in negotiation outcomes are widely documented in the academic literature and play an important role in public discourse about wage inequality, the glass ceiling, and gender-bias. In many high-stakes negotiation settings, an agent (e.g. a talent agent, real-estate agent, lawyer, etc.) negotiates on behalf of a principal. However, the effect of agents on negotiation gender gaps remains under-explored. In an online lab experiment where participants play a negotiation game, we find that absent agents there is an average gender gap in asks equal to 5% of the negotiated surplus. Introducing agents who are allowed to decide asks on behalf of their clients entirely closes this gender gap. We find evidence that this is because agents do not internalize the gender differences in negotiation-relevant quantities such as reservation prices among the clients they represent.
Regressive Electricity Subsidies
With Eric Hsu, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, and Abu Parves Shonchoy
Using administrative data on outages in Bangladesh we investigate how rationing may contribute to the regressive nature of subsidies.
(Please reach out if you would like to talk more about this project!)
Publications and Projects Outside Economics
Final Project for CIS 520 (Machine Learning). We train several machine learning models (Principal Component Regression, Principal Component Random Forests, and a Convolutional Neural Network) with the aim of predicting a neighborhood's income quintile from Google Street View photos.
Waninger S, Berka C, Stevanovic Karic M, Korszen S, Mozley PD, Henchcliffe C, Kang Y, Hesterman J, Mangoubi T, Verma A. Neurophysiological Biomarkers of Parkinson's Disease. J Parkinsons Dis. 2020;10(2):471-480. doi: 10.3233/JPD-191844. PMID: 32116262; PMCID: PMC7242849.
Cox RL, Calderon de Anda F, Mangoubi T, Yoshii A. Multiple Critical Periods for Rapamycin Treatment to Correct Structural Defects in Tsc-1-Suppressed Brain. Front Mol Neurosci. 2018 Nov 8;11:409. doi: 10.3389/fnmol.2018.00409. PMID: 30467464; PMCID: PMC6237075.