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, conditions which are very common, socially stigmatized, and linked to lower earnings and employment. In an online experiment, I find that people pay to avoid depressed or anxious coworkers in a simple communication-based problem-solving task—paying as much to avoid them as they do to work with the college-educated. A model of earnings-maximizing statistical discrimination with correct beliefs cannot explain these preferences: depressed or anxious coworkers are equally productive when exogenously assigned. Instead, I find evidence that discrimination is driven by incorrect beliefs about such coworkers as well as a likely incorrect perception that more costly effort is required to help them succeed. My results suggest that correcting beliefs could reduce discrimination. A major motivation for tackling discrimination is often to encourage revelation of mental illness (thereby perhaps improving access to treatment or support); however, I find that people pay to hide mental illness in my setting even when insulated from rejection or any financial consequence of discrimination.

Not Learning from Others. With John Conlon, Malavika Mani, Gautam Rao, and Frank Schilbach. Revised and resubmitted, Econometrica.
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.