My Research Projects
Work in progress:
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Truth, Honesty and Strategic Interactions, with Tanjim Hossain and Haomiao Yu
We experimentally investigate how introducing the concept of truth in the natural context of a game affects player behavior using two games. Two players simultaneously make reimbursement claims for a damaged product, where players’ payoffs depend only on their claims but not on the true price. Both games are dominance-solvable, and one of them has a strictly dominant strategy equilibrium, which many participants easily identified. Yet, claims in our experiments are significantly affected by the price. Analyzing the role of truth on participants’ choices, we show that one needs strategic considerations and preferences for honesty to explain the results.
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The Long-Term Effects of Unexpected Interruptions in Compulsory Schooling, with Boubacar Diop, Martino Pelli and Jeanne Tschopp.
We quantify the long-run impacts of childhood exposure to storms on education and labor market activities in India. The identification relies on an original continuous measure of exposure to storms during compulsory schooling that varies by birth-year cohort and district. Results suggest that storms lead to a deskilling of the affected regions; severe storms cause an increase of 18 and 4.8 percentage points of the proba- bility of accumulating an educational delay and no formal schooling respectively, and a fall of 8.1 percentage points in the probability of completing post-secondary education. Storms also reduce the probability of accessing regular salaried jobs.
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The Impact of News Coverage on Women's Job Mobility: Evidence from the MeToo Movement.
This paper studies the impact of news coverage on women's job mobility rates at the county level in the United States, exploiting the exogenous variation provided by the MeToo Movement. Using novel data on sexual assault news coverage with natural language processing for categorizing the lexical choice of articles, the average tone of news coverage at the county level is measured. The results show that the MeToo induced tone change of news coverage has a statistically significant impact on women's propensity to switch jobs. In particular, increasing the tone change by one standard deviation decreases the job mobility rate of women by 12.8 percent. Additionally, the tone change of sexual assault news coverage does have a statistically significant impact on the labour market mobility of men in the sample with a different magnitude compared to women. There is no evidence that other news events, such as news on property crimes, have an impact on the job-to-job transition rates of women. The results suggest that the impact of sexual assault news coverage on women's labour market decisions is amplified by the MeToo movement, especially when the information about sexual assaults is conveyed more positively compared to pre-MeToo Movement.