Works in Progress and Working Papers
Compensation Structure and Firm Wage Premia
I investigate the compensation channels through which firm pay premia are constructed using a unique data set of compensation records at over 1600 US firms. I find that high-paying firms increase both base and variable incentive pay relative to their competitors. To understand why firms treat these two premia as complements, I embed a textbook optimal contract model into a matching framework where workers of heterogeneous ability pair with firms that differ by productivity. My model reveals that the sorting of higher ability workers to high productivity firms can explain why high paying firms simultaneously increase base and bonus pay relative to their competitors.
Agents and The Gender Gap in Negotiations
With Jeanna Kenney
Published in the Journal of Economics Behavior & Organization (2025)
Oftentimes people delegate negotiation to others (i.e., “agents”), whether formally or informally. This paper explores the impact of agents on gender differences in negotiation and how this varies with common incentive structures. Using a bargaining experiment with over 2,400 subjects, we find that, absent agents, males make more aggressive demands than females. Introducing agents who negotiate on behalf of the players entirely closes this gap. Although agent incentives affect overall aggressiveness, they do not induce gender gaps. Belief elicitations suggest that this is because agents underestimate reservation prices for both males and females and incorrectly believe that they have the same threshold for rewarding aggressive behavior. While males and females have similar expected outcomes, agents close a risk exposure gap by making proposals across genders that are equally likely to be accepted.
Elite Capture of Clean Water in Bangladesh
With Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak and Alexander Van Geen
(Draft Available on Request)
Fifty-seven million residents of Bangladesh consume well water with arsenic concentrations exceeding WHO safety standards - the largest documented poisoning of a population in history. This widespread contamination has been shown to harm long-term health, cognition, and earnings. In response, over 200,000 low-arsenic deep wells have been installed to address this public-health challenge. However, the spatial distribution of these deep wells does not maximize their accessibility to populations currently drinking contaminated water. We investigate the extent to which elite capture (i.e. preferential distribution of public goods to elites) explains the existing inefficiency in deep-well placement. Using a triple differences strategy, we show that deep wells are built closer to local politicians' households when their political party is in power nationally. We then design a model where a social planner who may treat elites preferentially decides to place deep wells. Using the model to estimate counter-factuals, we find that elite capture accounts for about a fifth (18%) of current inefficiency in deep well placement.
Resume Screening and Labor-Market Signaling Models
With Judd Kessler, Corinne Low, and Xiaoyue Shan
(Draft Available on Request)
Job candidates typically choose how much information they reveal to employers on resumes. Under plausible assumptions, traditional signaling models predict that employers will infer that candidates who omit information in a given category (e.g., GPA) are of the lowest type for that category. We collect 2,840 employer ratings of resumes from 71 employers in a two-year field experiment and find that employers do not always treat omitted information as proof that a candidate is a lowest-type. This behavior by employers allows low-types to meaningfully benefit by omitting information which runs contrary to the prediction of standard signaling models. For example, we estimate that an applicant with a B-Average GPA benefits more from omitting their GPA than they would from reporting a prestigious internship at a company like Google or Morgan Stanley. Overall, our results suggest that existing signaling models may not adequately describe settings where senders can strategically choose to omit information.
Regressive Electricity Subsidies
With Eric Hsu, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, and Abu Parves Shonchoy
Using administrative data on outages in Bangladesh we investigate how rationing may contribute to the regressive nature of subsidies.
(Please reach out if you would like to talk more about this project!)