Working Papers

What Do Names Reveal? Impacts of Blind Evaluations on Composition and Quality

Reject and Resubmit, Review of Economic Studies

Concealing candidate identities during evaluations, or "blinding", is often proposed as a tool for combatting discrimination. I study how blinding impacts candidate selection and quality, and the forms of discrimination driving these effects. I conduct a natural field experiment at an academic conference, running each submitted paper through both blind and non-blind review. Four years after the experiment, I collect proxy measures of paper quality—citations and publication statuses—for each paper and link it to the experimental data. I find that blinding significantly reduces scores for traditionally high-scoring groups, and consequently alters the composition of applicants who are accepted to the conference. Despite these compositional changes, blinding does not worsen the conference's ability to select high-quality papers. I develop a model of evaluator discrimination that allows me to rationalize these effects and decompose non-blind disparities into two distinct forms of discrimination: accurate statistical discrimination and bias.

Winner of the 2023 UChicago Third Year Paper George S. Tolley Prize

Minimum Wages and Racial Discrimination in Hiring: Evidence from a Field Experiment

with Alec Brandon, Justin Holz, and Andrew Simon

Revision requested, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

When minimum wages increase, employers may respond to the regulatory burdens by substituting away from disadvantaged workers. We test this hypothesis using a correspondence study with 35,000 applications around ex-ante uncertain minimum wage increases in three U.S. states. Before the increases, applicants with distinctively Black names were 19 percent less likely to receive a callback than equivalent applicants with distinctively white names. Announcements of minimum wage hikes substantially reduce callbacks for all applicants but shrink the racial callback gap by 80 percent. Racial inequality decreases because firms disproportionately reduce callbacks to lower-quality white applicants who benefited from discrimination under lower minimum wages. 

*This project has been supported by a grant from the W.E. Upjohn Institute Early Career Research Award

W.E. Upjohn Policy brief 

Measuring Racial Educational Disparities Over Time Amongst Top Achievers

with Uditi Karna, Andrew Simon, Min Sok Lee, and John List

Forthcoming, Nature

Rising educational disparities and concomitant wealth inequities have been observed around the globe over the past several decades.  While those left behind have rightfully received considerable attention, much less scrutiny has been given to educational discrepancies in the deep right tail. Using rich administrative longitudinal data, we document an "excellence gap," and provide seven key facts.  The seven facts provide vital temporal insights into the gap, link stability of excellence and student backgrounds, and assess the efficacy of previous public policies to curb the excellence gap. Building such scientific knowledge provides a crucial first step to target and eliminate excellence gaps, a necessary ingredient to broaden the racial pool of innovators and remove the glass ceiling in labor markets. 

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow? Toward an Understanding of Fade-out in Early Childhood Education Programs

with John List

NBER version

An unsettling stylized fact is that decorated early childhood education programs improve cognitive skills in the short-term, but lose their efficacy after a few years. We implement a field experiment with two stages of randomization to explore the underpinnings of the fade-out effect. We first randomly assign preschool access to children, and then partner with the local school district to randomly assign the same children to classmates throughout elementary school. We find that the fade-out effect is critically-linked to the share of classroom peers assigned to preschool access—with enough treated peers the classic fade-out effect is muted. Our results highlight a paradoxical insight: while the fade-out effect has been viewed as a devastating critique of early childhood programs, our results highlight that fade-out is a key rationale for providing early education to all children. This is because human capital accumulation is inherently a social activity, leading early education programs to deliver their largest benefits at scale when everyone receives such programs.  

Using a Field Experiment to Understand Skill Formation During Adolescence

with Juanna Joensen, John List, and Anya Samek