I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the School of Economics at the University of Kent. I am on the job market 2024/2025. Here you can find my CV.
I received my PhD in Economics from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow in 2024. I hold an MSc in Economics from the University of Edinburgh. My research interests lie in applied microeconomics, labour economics, education, and behavioural economics.
We study the long-run effects of income inequality within peer compositions. An increase in the share of low-income peers within school-cohorts improves the educational outcomes of low-income students and negatively affects high-income students. We show this pattern is not likely explained by commonly observed mechanisms. We then propose a model based on reference-dependent preferences and social comparison that rationalizes our findings, highlighting the role of frustration or motivation depending on students' relative income. We also provide evidence consistent with this mechanism. Finally, we show that better connections in school can help to avoid such unintended consequences of income inequality.
Mothers may face pressure to sort out of the labor market from perceptions that women have an absolute advantage in child-rearing even when their earnings potential equals that of men. Guided by a simple model, we use a survey experiment where we equalize earnings potential across gender and show that women are perceived to hold an absolute advantage in child-rearing. We then experimentally test mechanisms that may underlie these beliefs, finding that mothers are expected to spend more time on skill investments with their children than are men who have equivalent time available. Finally, we conduct an experiment providing factual information on the performance of children when mothers work full-time, showing that beliefs update toward accurate perceptions and a reduction in the expected harm to the child. Our results suggest beliefs on absolute advantage matter for the efficacy of policies aimed at closing the gender pay gap and a role for policy to target channels where individual’s may be misinformed on children’s outcomes when mothers maintain careers.
The One-Child Policy in China and its Intergenerational Effects on Health (with Thi Tham Ta). [ Abstract | Draft ]
We study the spillover effects of China's one-child policy on the health outcomes of subsequent generations. Despite extensive research on the effects of family size on education, few studies have examined the policy's effects on health, especially across generations. Focusing on urban Han Chinese from the China Family Panel Studies data, we use a reduced form regression discontinuity design (RDD) to isolate the local average treatment effect of the policy. The results indicate that children of policy-affected parents show significant improvements in physical and mental health, which can be attributed to increased parental investment and care and improved parental health outcomes. Our findings contribute to the literature on the intergenerational transmission of health and quantity-quality trade-offs, and highlight how family planning policies can have lasting health effects across generations.
We explore the role of face-to-face and social interactions in academic settings in contributing to (or mitigating) gender differences in academic productivity. Our focus is on academic conferences, building on our previous work. In exploiting a “natural experiment” (the last-minute cancellation of a very large conference), we showed distinct conference benefits in terms of developing and advertising papers presented, and in authors’ forming new collaborations. More recently, we have discovered that these benefits appear to be gendered. We now propose to develop our existing dataset (comprising more than 29,000 conference papers) and conduct further analyses that will help us to verify, explore, and explain this phenomenon. The conference setting represents a specific opportunity for academics to meet in person. We contend that an understanding of the role of gender in this environment will cast light on the role of gender in academic workplaces more generally.
