Abstract: Labor market outcomes depend, in part, upon an individual's willingness to put herself forward for different opportunities. We use a series of experiments to explore gender differences in willingness to apply for higher return, more challenging work. We find that, in male-typed domains, qualified women are significantly less likely to apply than similarly well-qualified men. We provide evidence both in a controlled setting and in the field that reducing ambiguity surrounding required qualifications increases the rate at which qualified women apply. The effects are more mixed for men. Our results suggest a path for increasing the pool of qualified women applicants.

Final Version Link to Publication Replication Files

Abstract: We explore how feedback shapes, and perpetuates, gender gaps in self-assessments. Participants in our experiments take tests of their ability across different domains. Absent feedback, beliefs of own ability are strongly influenced by gender stereotypes: holding own ability fixed, individuals are more confident in more gender congruent domains (i.e. more male-typed for men, more female-typed for women). After feedback, stereotypes continue to shape posterior beliefs, even beyond what a Bayesian model would predict. This is primarily because both men and women update their beliefs more positively in response to good news when it arrives in a more gender congruent domain.

Final Version Link to Publication Replication Files

Abstract: While sexual misconduct in the workplace has complex and lasting consequences for directly affected individuals, its broader organizational implications remain less well understood. Using a novel dataset of over 1,000 documented sexual misconduct cases across U.S. universities, I examine how these publicly reported incidents affect departmental scientific productivity. Using the benefit of hindsight, I record the year sexual misconduct occurs and the year it becomes public. I employ coarsened exact matching and a staggered difference-in-differences design to compare control departments with those that experienced subsequently publicized misconduct incidents. Sexual misconduct shows no discernible effect on departmental productivity when it occurs, but public reporting reduces publications by 0.1 per faculty member annually — equivalent to nine fewer publications over five years for a median department of 18 members. These findings reveal that organizational costs arise specifically from public disclosure rather than from the misconduct itself. This distinction between occurrence and disclosure effects suggests that protecting victims and maintaining productivity may require differentiated policy approaches as institutions navigate competing demands from legal frameworks, ethical obligations, and performance concerns. These dynamics help explain both why social pressures transform misconduct from HR concerns into strategic organizational challenges and why firms may prioritize confidentiality strategies.

Paper Draft OSF Registry

Abstract: We investigate how much individuals value workplaces free of hostility and how these preferences affect sorting in the labor market. We conduct a choice experiment involving 2,048 participants recruited from alums and recent graduates at a large public university. Our results show that individuals are willing to forgo a significant portion of their earnings — between 12 and 36 percent of their wage — to avoid hostile work environments. Women exhibit a stronger aversion to exclusionary workplaces and environments with sexual harassment. Combining survey evidence, experimental variations of workplace environments, and real labor market outcomes, we show that disutility from workplace hostility and perceptions of risk are consequential for gender gaps in career choices. To understand how hostility shapes preferences for alternative workplace arrangements, we propose a model of compensating differentials. Using counterfactual exercises, we find that gender differences in workplace hostility risks significantly drive both the remote pay penalty and the rents of office workers.

Paper Draft AEA Registry

Abstract: Gender diversity is a key driver of the rate and direction of innovative activities, but we know little about how to achieve it. A rapidly growing literature that focuses on patenting documents a persistent gender gap in innovative activities. I look at the pipeline of potential female inventors and study women's decisions to complete graduate school and their propensity and intensity to publish under two different institutional and normative settings. To explore this question, I turn to the German reunification in 1990 as my empirical setting. At that time, East and West Germany show sizable differences in institutional incentives and attitudes toward working women. Using a newly assembled dataset of German Ph.D. graduates in STEM fields, I show that East Germany graduates significantly and persistently more women doctorates than West Germany. A difference-in-difference approach infers that the change in institutions, policies, and norms increase the gender gap in the intensity to publish. Taken together, this case study offers insights into how to increase gender diversity in science.

Draft available upon request

Abstract: Workplace culture is a well-established driver of long-term organizational success. Using a controlled experiment, we explore whether hostile work environments impact individual and group performance. Participants are randomly assigned to groups with varying gender composition, where they complete rounds of quizzes. In each round, group members decide whether to nominate their own performance to count toward the group's payoff. The work environment is manipulated to be either friendly or unfriendly through pre-specified messages that group members can send to one another after each round. We find that individuals who work in a hostile and majority-men team earn less. This result is not explained by changes in quiz performance, but by nomination decisions. Men tend to make suboptimal nomination decisions under hostility, in particular by being over-confident in their own nomination. Using an incentive-compatible choice experiment, we find that the experience of hostile interactions increases the willingness-to-pay for working conditions in which these interactions will be mitigated, particularly for male respondents.

Draft available upon request

AEA Registry

Abstract: Sexual harassment in academic settings creates hostile environments that may have lasting consequences beyond the direct targets. While prior research has examined harassment's effects on scientific production at the team level, less is known about how exposure to harassment shapes the experiences and outcomes of junior researchers—such as research assistants and doctoral students—who are in critical stages of skill development and career formation. In this paper, we examine how working in a team where sexual harassment occurred affects juniors' training experiences and subsequent career choices. By focusing on this vulnerable population, we aim to shed light on the mechanisms through which hostile environments disrupt talent pipelines and impede human capital development in science. Our findings have implications for understanding the full costs of workplace misconduct and for designing interventions that protect the next generation of researchers.

Draft available soon