Research

Mental Illness Discrimination.  Working Paper (Job Market Paper).
Pre-registration  Press Coverage ('Ideas Made to Matter', MIT Sloan)

I study discrimination against people with symptoms of depression or anxiety, common conditions linked to lower earnings and employment. In a communication-based problem-solving task, people pay as much to avoid depressed or anxious workers as they do to work with the college-educated. This is despite depressed or anxious workers being equally productive when exogenously assigned. Discrimination is driven partly by incorrect beliefs about such workers as well as an increase in costly effort when working with them. One motivation for tackling discrimination is to encourage revelation of mental illness; however, workers pay to hide mental illness in my setting even when insulated from financial consequences of discrimination.

Not Learning from Others. With John Conlon, Malavika Mani, Gautam Rao, and Frank Schilbach. Submitted.
Pre-registration  Experimental Scripts 

We provide evidence of a powerful barrier to social learning: people are much less sensitive to information others discover compared to equally-relevant information they discover themselves. In a series of incentivized lab experiments, we ask participants to guess the color composition of balls in an urn after drawing balls with replacement. Participants' guesses are substantially less sensitive to draws made by another player compared to draws made themselves. This result holds when others' signals must be learned through discussion, when they are perfectly communicated by the experimenter, and even when participants see their teammate drawing balls from the urn with their own eyes. We find a crucial role for taking some action to generate one's 'own' information, and rule out distrust, confusion, errors in probabilistic thinking, up-front inattention and imperfect recall as channels.

Learning in the Household. With John Conlon, Malavika Mani, Gautam Rao, and Frank Schilbach.
NBER Working Paper

Do spouses pool useful information and learn from each other when they have incentives to do so? In an experiment with married couples in India, we vary whether individuals discover information themselves or must instead learn via a discussion about what their spouse discovered. Women treat their own and their husband's information the same. In contrast, men respond half as much to information discovered by their wife, even when it is perfectly communicated. When paired with strangers, both men and women heavily discount their partner's information relative to their own. We thus provide evidence of a gender difference in social learning (only) in the household.