WORKING PAPERS

Financial Frictions and Human Capital Investments

Awards: HEC Top Finance Graduate Award 2023, FMA Napa/Sonoma Finance Conference’s best paper award 2023, FRA Conference Michael J. Barclay Young Scholar Award 2022, CEPR European Conference on Household Finance PhD Student Prize 2022, NBER Dissertation Fellowship on Consumer Financial Management 2022

Grants: NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant 2021, Peterson Foundation Pandemic Response Policy Research Grant 2021, Financial Institutions and Markets Research Center at Kellogg 2021, RSF Grant for Economic Inequality 2019, Kellogg School of Management Ph.D. Research Grant 2019

Does the type of financing affect college students' choice of major? Between 2001 and 2021, 22 U.S. universities implemented universal no-loan policies (UNLPs), replacing student loans with grants. I find that UNLPs increased the number of students choosing a high-paying major by 6%. The effect is strongest for students from low-income backgrounds, and it is driven by increased selection of majors associated with low initial earnings but high lifetime earnings, suggesting that financial frictions play a key role in major choice. Additional evidence on mechanisms suggest that students choose more difficult majors and are more likely to attend graduate school.

Artificial Intelligence and the Labor Market (with Dimitris Papanikolaou, Larry Schmidt, and Bryan Seegmiller) 

We leverage recent advances in NLP to construct measures of workers’ task exposure to AI and machine learning technologies over the 2010 to 2023 period that vary across firms and time. Using a theoretical framework that allows for a labor-saving technology to affect worker productivity both directly and indirectly, we show that the impact on wage earnings and employment can be summarized by two statistics. First, labor demand decreases in the average exposure of workers’ tasks to AI technologies; second, holding the average exposure constant, labor demand increases in the dispersion of task exposures to AI, as workers shift effort to tasks that are not displaced by AI. Exploiting exogenous variation in our measures based on pre-existing hiring practices across firms, we find empirical support for these predictions, together with a lower demand for skills affected by AI. Overall, we find muted effects of AI on employment due to offsetting effects: highly-exposed occupations experience relatively lower demand compared to less exposed occupations, but the resulting increase in firm productivity increases overall employment across all occupations.

Peer Effects and the Gender Gap in Corporate Leadership: Evidence from MBA Students (with Ashley Wong and Francesca Truffa)

Revise and Resubmit, Quarterly Journal of Economics

Awards: Carlo Dell'Aringa Young Economist Prize 2023, Outstanding Paper Award - 2nd Discrimination and Diversity Workshop 2022, Unicredit Foundation 11th Best Paper Award on Gender Economics 2021, Susan Schmidt Bies Prize for Doctoral Student Research on Economics and Public Policy 2019

Women continue to be underrepresented in corporate leadership positions. This paper studies the role of social connections in women's career advancement. We investigate whether access to a larger share of female peers in business school affects the gender gap in senior managerial positions. Merging administrative data from a top-10 US business school with public LinkedIn profiles, we first document that female MBAs are 24 percent less likely than male MBAs to enter senior management within 15 years of graduation. Next, we use the random assignment of students into sections to show that a larger proportion of female MBA section peers increases the likelihood of entering senior management for women but not for men. This effect is driven by female-friendly firms, such as those with more generous maternity leave policies and greater work schedule flexibility. A larger proportion of female MBA peers induces women to transition to these firms where they attain senior management roles. We find suggestive evidence that some of the mechanisms behind these results include job referrals and gender-specific information transmission. These findings highlight the role of social connections in reducing the gender gap in senior management positions.

Intra-Household Decisions and Labor Market Outcomes - Evidence from Shared Parental Leave (with Andrea Ferrara and Joao Monteiro) 

This paper examines the impact of intra-household decisions over the split of childcare duties on labor market outcomes. We study the introduction of shared parental leave in Portugal, which allows parents to decide on the allocation of leave days. Using a model of the household, we show that introducing shared parental leave leads to an increase in women’s wages, as they are allocated a lower of childcare duties when compared with the allocation before shared parental leave is introduced. Moreover, this wage increase should be more pronounced for high-productivity women. Using a novel data set which combines household data with matched employer-employee data, we find that the monthly wages of women increase by 1 percent relative to the wages of men. We also find that most of this increase is driven by women which are the primary earners in their household. Our results suggest that the effectiveness of childcare policies in mitigating gender inequality in the labor market may be determined by intra-household decisions.

WORKS IN PROGRESS

College, Debt, and Gender: The Influence of Outside Options on Higher Education  (with Titan Alon and Laura Murphy)

Diversifying Innovation: How Student Debt Affects Diversity in Entrepreneurship  (with Ashley Wong and Francesca Truffa)