Research

Poverty, Depression and Anxiety: Causal Evidence and Mechanisms. With Gautam Rao, Frank Schilbach and Vikram Patel. Science, 370 (6522), 2020.

Why are people who live in poverty disproportionately affected by mental illness? We review the interdisciplinary evidence of the bi-directional causal relationship between poverty and common mental illnesses -- depression and anxiety -- and the underlying mechanisms. Research shows that mental illness reduces employment and therefore income and that psychological interventions generate economic gains. Similarly, negative economic shocks cause mental illness, and anti-poverty programs, such as cash transfers, improve mental health. A crucial step toward the design of effective policies is to better understand the mechanisms underlying these causal effects. 

Fiscal and Education Spillovers from Charter School Expansion. With Camille Terrier. Journal of Human Resources, 60 (4),  2025.

Do charter schools drain resources and high-achieving peers from non-charter schools? We provide new evidence on the fiscal and educational consequences of charter expansion for non-charter students, using a 2011 reform that lifted caps on charter schools for under-performing districts in Massachusetts. We use complementary synthetic control (SC) and differences-in-differences instrumental variables (IV-DiD) estimators. Our results suggest greater charter attendance leaves per-pupil revenue unchanged but increases per-pupil expenditures, hence generating a fiscal stress on traditional public schools. Charter expansion also induces schools to shift expenditure from support services to instruction and salaries, and ultimately increases non-charter students’ achievement in math.

Not Learning from Others. With John Conlon, Malavika Mani, Gautam Rao, and Frank Schilbach. Conditionally Accepted, Journal of Political Economy.
Pre-registration  Experimental Scripts 

We study social learning using experiments where two people independently learn relevant information and can share it to make accurate private decisions. Across three experiments, people are substantially less sensitive to information others discover than to equally-relevant information they discovered themselves. This holds when they must learn information from others through discussion; when the experimenter perfectly communicates the information; and even when participants observe others’ information with their own eyes. Our results therefore stem not from a failure to elicit information from others but a systematic tendency to underweight it relative to one’s own information. Our findings illustrate a powerful barrier to social learning that might underlie many documented cases of failure to learn from others. 

Mental Illness Discrimination.  Submitted.
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 workers with clinically significant symptoms as they pay to work with the college-educated, even though symptomatic workers are equally productive when exogenously assigned. I find suggestive evidence for mechanisms including an increase in costly effort with such workers and lower expected task enjoyment. I find little evidence that tackling discrimination encourages revelation of mental illness: workers pay to hide symptoms in my setting even when insulated from discrimination’s financial consequences.

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.