Publications

In 1942 more than 110,000 persons of Japanese origin living on the U.S. West Coast were forcibly sent away to ten internment camps for one to three years. This paper studies how internees’ careers were affected in the long run. Combining Census data, camp records, and survey data, I develop a predictor of a person’s internment status based on Census observables. Using a difference-in-differences framework, I find that internment had long-run positive effects on earnings. The evidence is consistent with mechanisms related to increased mobility due to re-optimization of occupation and location choices, possibly facilitated by camps’ high economic diversity.

We model the world economy as one system of endogenous input-output relationships subject to distortions and study how the world’s input-output structure and world’s GDP change due to changes in distortions. We derive a sufficient statistic to identify distortions from the observed world input-output matrix, which we fully match for the year 2011. Our main empirical result is to determine how changes in internal distortions (affecting transactions across sectors within countries) impact the whole structure of the world’s economy and show that they have a much larger effect on world’s GDP than external distortions (affecting transactions across countries).

There is an increasingly prevalent expectation in contemporary society that employees be passionate for their work. Here, we suggest that employers and employees can have different understandings of passion that potentially conflict. More specifically, we argue that although employers may often be well-intentioned, their emphasis on employee passion may at times amount to normative control and reflect a means to attain valued work outcomes. In contrast, employees may primarily view their pursuit of passion as an opportunity to self-actualize, and thereby, view passion as an end in itself. We propose that when employees notice that these two understandings of passion diverge, they experience uncertainty in adjudicating which understanding of passion—their own or their employer’s—to privilege. Critically, employees may feel responsible for and subsequently seek ways to reduce this uncertainty, and doing so places added demands that impedes employees’ ability to perform. We discuss why employers may not necessarily recognize how their understanding of passion can create challenges for employees, and examine the difficulties employers face in attempting to resolve the tensions employees experience. Subsequently, we develop an agenda for future research that highlights how individual, organizational, and cultural differences may lead to variation in divergent understandings of passion, and the critical role managers could play in helping address employees’ uncertainty.

Investment funds that claim to focus on socially responsible stocks have proliferated in recent times. In this paper, we verify whether ESG mutual funds actually invest in firms that have stakeholder-friendly track records. Using a comprehensive sample of self-labelled ESG mutual funds (as identified by Morningstar) in the United States from 2010 to 2018, we find that these funds hold portfolio firms with worse track records for compliance with labor and environmental laws, relative to portfolio firms held by non-ESG funds managed by the same financial institutions in the same years. Relative to other funds offered by the same asset managers in the same years, ESG funds hold stocks that are more likely to voluntarily disclose carbon emissions performance but also stocks with higher carbon emissions per unit of revenue. Despite these findings, ESG funds hold portfolio firms with higher average ESG scores. We show that ESG scores are correlated with the quantity of voluntary ESG-related disclosures but not with firms’ compliance records or actual levels of carbon emissions. Finally, ESG funds appear to underperform financially relative to other funds within the same asset manager and year, and to charge higher fees. Our findings suggest that socially responsible funds do not appear to follow through on proclamations of concerns for stakeholders.

We study fairness in the context of classification where the performance is measured by the area under the curve (AUC) of the receiver operating characteristic. AUC is commonly used when both Type I (false positive) and Type II (false negative) errors are important. However, the same classifier can have significantly varying AUCs for different protected groups and, in real-world applications, it is often desirable to reduce such cross-group differences. We address the problem of how to select additional features to most greatly improve AUC for the disadvantaged group. Our results establish that the unconditional variance of features does not inform us about AUC fairness but class-conditional variance does. Using this connection, we develop a novel approach, fairAUC, based on feature augmentation (adding features) to mitigate bias between identifiable groups. We evaluate fairAUC on synthetic and real-world (COMPAS) datasets and find that it significantly improves AUC for the disadvantaged group relative to benchmarks maximizing overall AUC and minimizing bias between groups.

We present new data on female representation in the academic finance profession. In our sample of finance faculty at top-100 U.S. business schools during 2009–2017, only 16.0% are women. The gender imbalance manifests itself in several ways. First, after controlling for research productivity, women hold positions at lower-ranked institutions and are less likely to be full professors. There is also evidence that they are paid less. Second, women publish fewer papers. This gender gap exists in research quantity, not quality. Third, women have more female coauthors, suggesting smaller publication networks. Time-series data suggest shrinking gender gaps in recent years.

Does flexible pay increase the gender wage gap? To answer this question we analyze the wages of public-school teachers in Wisconsin, where a 2011 reform allowed school districts to set teachers' pay more flexibly and engage in individual negotiations. Using quasi-exogenous variation in the timing of the introduction of flexible pay driven by the expiration of pre-existing collective-bargaining agreements, we show that flexible pay increased the gender pay gap among teachers with the same credentials. This gap is larger for younger teachers and absent for teachers working under a female principal or superintendent. Survey evidence suggests that the gap is partly driven by women not engaging in negotiations over pay, especially when the counterpart is a man. This gap is not driven by gender differences in job mobility, ability, or a higher demand for male teachers. We conclude that environmental factors are an important determinant of the gender wage gap in contexts where workers are required to negotiate.

In the United States today, there is a broad cultural understanding that market forces drive pay outcomes. But prior to the 1980s, pay was understood to be the product of bureaucratic processes internal to organizations. The question of whether pay is determined by the market or organizational decisions is essential for evaluating employers’ liability for gender pay inequality, as employers are not responsible for inequalities resulting from the “economic realities” of the labor market. This article locates the shift in cultural beliefs about pay in key court decisions in the 1970s and 1980s. At that time, a social movement for pay equity used the idea of comparable worth to hold organizations accountable for inequality between jobs held by women and similarly valuable jobs held by men. But the judges who ruled on these cases were informed by a different movement, known as law and economics, which led them to conceptualize pay as the product of market forces instead of organizational decisions. These judges’ decisions limited employers’ liability for the pay gap and precipitated a transformation of the cultural common sense of pay within organizations, which increasingly adopted market-based approaches. The case of comparable worth highlights the role of judges, who have a unique role in determining the impact of social movements while themselves being targeted by such movements.