Gender gaps in education have closed in many parts of the world while gaps in employment remain wide open, even among college graduates. This paper asks why. We track the job search of 2,400 students graduating from two major universities in Pakistan — a country where two out of three college-educated women stay out of the labor force. We document that men and women begin with the same work aspirations, apply at the same time and at similar rates, and receive a comparable number of job offers. However, women are more likely to turn down these offers such that, six months post-graduation, the gender employment gap is 27 pp. Differences in the returns to application timing underpin this pattern: the likelihood of accepting an offer declines over time for women, not for men. This finding motivates our experiment, which financially incentivizes students to apply to jobs within a month of graduation. The intervention shifts applications earlier for both genders but raises employment for women only, reducing the gender employment gap by 34%. Treatment works on women who experience “the illusion of time”, i.e. those who underestimate how quickly external constraints—particularly from families and the marriage market— arise. By inducing these women to search before constraints bind, our intervention increases their chances of accepting a job offer.

Unlike gender or race, class is rarely a focus of research or DEI efforts in elite US occupations. Should it be? In this paper, we document a large class gap in career progression in one labor market: US tenure-track academia. Using parental education to proxy for socioeconomic background, we compare career outcomes of people who got their PhDs in the same institution and field (excluding those with PhD parents). First-generation college graduates are 13% less likely to end up tenured at an R1, and are on average tenured at institutions ranked 9% lower, than their PhD classmates with a parent with a (non-PhD) graduate degree. We explore three mechanisms: (1) productivity, (2) preferences, and (3) discrimination. Research productivity can explain at most a third of the class gap, meaning first-gen college grads are “underplaced” at lower-ranked institutions than their research record would predict. Preferences explain almost none of the class gap. Discrimination likely explains the residual. Specifically, systemic or direct discrimination may arise from a lack of social and cultural capital. We find evidence consistent with this in analyses of coauthor networks and NSF awards. Finally, examining PhDs who work in industry we find a class gap in pay and in managerial responsibilities which widens over the career. This establishes that a class gap in career progression exists in other US occupations beyond academia.

We study the causal impacts of income on a rich array of employment outcomes, leveraging an experiment in which 1,000 low-income individuals were randomized into receiving $1,000 per month unconditionally for three years, with a control group of 2,000 participants receiving $50/month. We gather detailed survey data, administrative records, and data from a mobile phone app. The transfer caused total individual income excluding the transfers to fall by about $2,000/year relative to the control group and a 3.9 percentage point decrease in labor market participation. Participants reduced their work hours as a result of the transfers by 1-2 hours/week and participants’ partners reduced their work hours by a comparable amount. Among other categories of time use, the greatest increase generated by the transfer was in time spent on leisure. Despite asking detailed questions about amenities, we find no impact on quality of employment, and our confidence intervals can rule out even small improvements. We observe no significant effects on investments in human capital, though younger participants may pursue more formal education. Overall, our results suggest a moderate labor supply effect that does not appear offset by other productive activities.

This paper provides new evidence on the causal relationship between income and health by studying a randomized experiment in which 1,000 low-income adults in the United States received $1,000 per month for three years, with 2,000 control participants receiving $50 over that same period. The cash transfer resulted in large but short-lived improvements in stress and food security, greater use of hospital and emergency department care, and increased medical spending of about $20 per month in the treatment relative to the control group. The use of other office-based care— particularly dental care—may also have increased as a result of the transfer. However, we find no effect of the transfer across several measures of physical health as captured by multiple well-validated survey measures and biomarkers derived from blood draws. We can rule out even very small improvements in physical health, and the effect that would be implied by the cross-sectional correlation between income and health lies well outside our confidence intervals. We also find that the transfer did not improve mental health after the first year and by year 2 we can again reject very small improvements. We also find precise null effects on self-reported access to health care, physical activity, sleep, and several other measures related to preventive care and health behaviors. Our results imply that more targeted interventions may be more effective at reducing health inequality between high- and low-income individuals, at least for the population and time frame that we study.

This thesis explores corporate political activity as a bundle of economic goods by analyzing heterogeneity between industries’ spending on lobbying, PAC contributions, and the appointment of former political officials to a corporate board of directors. By using hand-collected data on political connections of board members, and years of lobbying and PAC expenses, this paper reveals the sector-specific preferences of the firms within the S&P 500 as of Spring 2021. The analysis shows clear differences between the nonmarket strategies of each industry, signaled by whether or not the industry views the three methods of political engagement as complementary of substitute goods. This tactical selection suggests diverse motivations and goals between sectors and solidifies the theory that firms (and the executives that lead them) perceive corporate political activity as strategically apt.

Using Portuguese drug-decriminalization as a comparison, this paper explores American drug regulations from the Reagan Administration to today and asks the question: would a similar policy work in the United States?