with Alex Eble.
This paper studies how gender preference shapes decisions in junior hiring and early-career promotions. We combine novel data on job advertisements, recruiting evaluations, and the promotion history of junior civil servants in China. We find stated male preference in civil service job advertisements, which discourages women from applying for these jobs. During the hiring process, female candidates receive lower evaluations, but only in the part of the evaluation where gender identity is disclosed. Consequently, similarly qualified women are less likely than men to be hired as civil servants. Despite outperforming their male counterparts, women in civil service positions are 35-45% less likely to be promoted. These findings illustrate how gender preference influences career trajectories from job advertisements to promotion decisions, helping explain the persistence of gender inequality in leadership roles. We conclude by presenting quasi-experimental evidence that two targeted policies – designed to address gender preference in advertisements and candidate assessment – effectively reduce gender disparities in both candidate evaluations and hiring outcomes.
with Alex Eble.
Professional advancement often comes through personal connections. This study analyzes how gender persistently shapes the career benefits workers enjoy from positive shocks to their network of connections. We follow mid-career academic scientists in China who compete to serve temporarily on a major scientific funding body. This role brings substantial opportunities to expand their personal networks, partly through increased interactions with senior scientists who are gatekeepers of research funding. Specifically, we estimate how service affects career advancement differentially by gender over time. For males, service is linked to a 56 percent increase in high-stakes, high-value grants awarded, a doubling of the likelihood of promotion, and more than a 20 percent increase in the likelihood of becoming a gatekeeper with whom subsequent scholars choose to network. In contrast, females experience no significant gains on any of these outcomes. This disparity appears to flow primarily through an expansion to the professional networks of male but not female scientists. Notably, the benefits of service to females and males are comparable in magnitude when female scientists have more opportunities to network with senior female scientists. These findings help explain the persistence of gender inequality in senior roles in science and other male-dominated fields.
with Wei Huang.
While funding is essential for promoting science, little is known about how connections affect allocation of scientific funding resources. In this paper, we investigate how connections with a grant review committee member (“panelist”) affect researchers’ chances of getting funded by NSFC (National Natural Science Foundation of China), one of the world’s largest scientific funding agencies. Using both hand-collected and administrative data, we find that connected researchers are more likely to be awarded scientific grants and closer connections are associated with a larger likelihood of being funded. We also find that connected researchers have poorer publication quality and fewer first-authored publications than unconnected ones, despite no difference in the total number of publications. Our findings suggest that nepotism in scientific funding evaluation may lead to misallocation of research resources.
(a full list of publications can be found on my CV)
with Alex Eble. Review of Economics and Statistics (2022, accepted)
[PDF] [video of coauthor presenting it at the NBER Education Program’s 2021 Fall meetings]
Colleges can send signals about their quality by adopting new, more alluring names. We study how this affects college choice and labor market performance of college graduates. Administrative data show name-changing colleges enroll higher-aptitude students, with larger effects for alluring-but-misleading name changes and among students with less information. A large resume audit study suggests a small premium for new college names in most jobs, and a significant penalty in lower-status jobs. We characterize student and employer beliefs using web-scraped text, surveys, and other data. Our study shows signals designed to change beliefs can have real, lasting impacts on market outcomes.
with Alex Eble. Nature Human Behaviour 6: 868–879 (2022)
[PDF] [World Bank’s Development Impact Blog] [GlobalDev] [Nature’s Behind the Paper series] [twitter thread]
In many societies, beliefs about differential intellectual ability by gender persist across generations. These societal beliefs can contribute to individual belief formation and thus lead to persistent gender inequality across multiple dimensions. We show evidence of intergenerational transmission of gender norms through peers and how this affects gender gaps in learning. We use nationally representative data from China and the random assignment of children to middle school classrooms to estimate the effect of being assigned a peer group with a high proportion of parents who believe boys are innately better than girls at learning math. We find this increases a child’s likelihood of holding the belief, with greater effects from peers of the same gender. It also affects the child’s demonstrated math ability, generating gains for boys and losses for girls. Our findings highlight how the informational environment in which children grow up can shape their beliefs and academic ability.
with Alex Eble. Economics of Education Review 77: 101994 (2020) [PDF]
with Alex Eble. Economics of Education Review 70: 61-74 (2019) [PDF]
Journal of Comparative Economics 46: 582-597 (2018) [PDF]
Economics Letters 137: 54-58 (2015) [PDF]
World Development 72: 296-307 (2015) [PDF]
with Zhaoyuan Xu and Yuyu Chen. China Economic Review 22(1): 64-74 (2011) [PDF]
with 李善同. 管理世界 2: 67-74 (2009) [PDF]
with 陈玉宇. 金融研究 12: 178-192 (2012) [PDF]