Selection and Sorting when Supervisors have Discretion: Experimental Evidence from a Tanzanian Factory [JMP] – with Yihong Huang, Working paper, July 2026. (Conferences: PEDL Early-Career Researchers Workshop 2026; EUDN Scientific Conference 2026; NBER Summer Institute 2025; PacDev 2025; CEGA Africa Evidence Summit 2024; NEUDC 2024; Featured in: Economics that Really Matters) [Download Working Paper]

Almost all firms rely on supervisors to select and motivate workers, but what are the costs and benefits of doing so? In partnership with a large garment factory in Tanzania, we implement a series of field experiments to examine supervisor discretion in the selection of workers for promotion to leadership positions. In a first experiment with workers, we randomly vary whether the role of supervisors is emphasized in the selection process when workers make application decisions. During the discretionary selection process itself, we then randomize whether supervisors face financial incentives based on the quality of the workers they select. Our results show that delegation crowds in supervisors’ private information about the leadership quality of workers. However, delegation also generates costs for firms. Supervisor choices are misaligned with the firm’s objectives, as incentives reduce the likelihood that supervisors refer a worker they are personally connected to. Correspondingly, discretion is disliked by workers and reduces the quantity, although not the quality, of workers who apply for promotion. Importantly, the effects of discretion depend on the quality of the decision maker. Higher quality supervisors make better discretionary decisions to begin with. Furthermore, supervisor selection does not discourage workers from applying, and crowds in higher quality applicants, when the supervisors choosing are themselves of higher quality.

Breaking the Spiral of Silence – with Yihong Huang, Working paper, February 2025; Conditionally Accepted, Journal of Political Economy (Conferences: Stanford SITE 2024) [Download Working Paper]

Self-censorship is pervasive in today's social climate, distorting political discourse and decision-making processes that either explicitly or implicitly take public opinion into account. What drives self-censorship, and how can misperceptions about public opinion be corrected? The Spiral of Silence theory offers insights, positing that people who hold views perceived as socially inappropriate tend to self-censor, generating a distribution of expressed views that is skewed towards appropriate opinions. If the attention paid to silence is limited, this can exacerbate self-censorship and create an equilibrium where only socially appropriate views are expressed and considered dominant. Conceptually, we develop a two-stage signaling model in which self-censorship and limited attention to silence jointly interact to affect beliefs and public expression. We then experimentally test our model predictions in a dynamic, unified experimental framework where college students discuss controversial topics together. Our results show that students with socially inappropriate views self-censor to a significant degree. Given the limited attention paid to silence in the status quo, self-censorship amplifies over time. We experimentally increase the salience of silence and find that this leads to both more accurate beliefs about public opinion and increases the diversity of views expressed. Because inference and expression are self-reinforcing, different levels of attention to silence lead to diverging equilibria.

The Psychology of Poverty: Current and Future Directions– with Ye Rang Park, Kristina Hallez, Supreet Kaur, Mahesh Srinivasan, and Jiaying Zhao Current Directions in Psychological Science (2024).

An emerging literature on “the psychology of poverty” suggests that the experience of poverty itself has psychological consequences, some of which may make escaping poverty more difficult. We synthesize the evidence base from both psychology and economics using an organizing framework comprising four sets of mechanisms: cognitive function, mental health, beliefs, and preferences. We discuss the strength of the evidence supporting both how poverty affects these four mechanisms, and how these four mechanisms in turn affect poverty. As our review shows, the existing evidence has clearly established proof of concept that psychological factors exist in the experience of and response to poverty. However, there is still a lack of evidence on whether these effects are meaningful in magnitude and lead to the perpetuation of poverty. We conclude by summarizing promising future directions for research which could help close these evidence gaps, with important implications for the design of poverty reduction policies.

Gender Differences in Competition: The role of Rank Effects – Draft available upon request.

People inevitably rank themselves against others - but when are these comparisons performance enhancing and when are they hindering? Estimating the effects of rank on outcomes poses an empirical challenge because rank is often endogenously determined. This paper exploits quasi-exogenous variation in relative rank in a high-stakes, real world setting to study the causal effects of rank on performance. In competitive swimming, swimmers are usually divided into sub-groups, or heats, based on their ex-ante rankings. The difference in entry times between any two swimmers ex-ante is quite small, often tenths of seconds, but swimmers just above the threshold will be placed in a faster heat, as the last ranked swimmer, while swimmers just below the threshold will be placed in a slower heat, as the first ranked swimmer. Exploiting this quasi-exogenous variation in relative rank, I use a regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal effects of rank on performance. Standard economic models would predict no effect of group rank on performance in this setting, as it is rank in the overall competition rather than rank in a specific heat that matters for tournament outcomes. In contrast, the results show there are significant gender differences in response to rank. Women significantly improve their performance when they are ranked first in a slower heat relative to when they are ranked last in a faster heat, whereas there is no comparable effect of rank on performance for men. Taken together, the results suggest there are significant gender differences in response to competition incentives in a real-world, high stakes setting that cannot be captured by standard economic models.

Work in Progress

Scarcity and Social Preferences, joint with Yihong Huang and Michelle Layvant

Planned versus Realized Labor Supply: Evidence from the Gig Economy, joint with Shreya Sarkar

Other Writing

Institutions and Economic Development: Taking Stock and Looking Forward– with Ernesto Dal Bó and Frederico Finan, CEGA Working Paper, 2022.