Working Papers and Publications
“Designing Gender Equity: Evidence from Hiring Practices”
Revise and Resubmit, American Economic Review
I combine novel data on job applications and hiring decisions for the universe of public sector jobs in Brazil and a natural experiment that decreased discretion in hiring to analyze how screening determines gender application and hiring gaps. I find that hiring practices have crucial gender equity consequences for selection and sorting, and not all approaches to reduce discretion have the same implications. Limiting discretion in existing tools or adding new impartial tools reduce the gender hiring gap by a third. However, policies that eliminate subjective tools like interviews are ineffective, suggesting employers should carefully weigh bias-information trade-offs.
“Personal Connections and Hiring Decisions in the Public Sector”
(with Eleonora Patacchini)
Relying on comprehensive employment records of applicants in the universe of public jobs in Brazil from 1986 until 2017, an institutional reform that reduced discretion in hiring, and novel performance metrics for public administration, we provide the first evidence of how past coworker networks shape job search and hiring. We find that a reduction in the ability to leverage personal connections affects job seekers’ search effort, the type of jobs they target, as well as employers’ hiring decisions. Moreover, hires after the reform are of higher quality, have lower separation rates and absenteeism, and are more likely to be promoted. We also show that the decrease in connected hires improves the operational and budgetary efficiency of public sector establishments. These results suggest that referral hiring may be detrimental to productivity when referrers do not face financial incentives.
“Beyond Tuition: College Cost Accuracy and Student Outcomes”
This paper goes beyond the focus of the college affordability debate on tuition and studies how living expenses affect the human capital accumulation of US college students. Cost of living (COL) allowances reported by colleges are a substantial part of cost of attendance, which limits federal loan and grant amounts. Without regulation or oversight, self-reported college COL estimates considerably differ from local cost benchmarks, with under-reporting particularly pervasive in for-profits. Exploiting within-university variation in levels of reported living costs, I show that under-reporting in for-profits lowers student aid received by students, increases dropout rates, and incentivizes excessive enrollment of low-income individuals. By having all universities follow standardized COL estimates and making the average under-estimating for-profit university perfectly accurate, dropout rates would decrease by 15%.
“The Impact of International Students on Housing Markets”
(with Pedro Tremacoldi-Rossi), Canadian Journal of Economics, 2023
We study the impact of the 2005-2015 international student boom in US universities on local housing markets. By constructing a sample of American college towns characterizing rarely studied local markets in small urban areas, we show that international students exogenously sustained demand for rentals and residential investment, representing countercyclical shocks during the Great Recession. Exploiting the historical distribution of foreign enrollment across college towns and country-of-origin networks, we find that international students increased rents by 1.3% and home prices by 2.5% relative to the housing boom peak, translating into home equity gains of $4,000. An analysis exploiting within-city dynamics reveals that neighborhoods near campus absorbed international inflows by replacing single-family homes with apartment rentals.