Inclusion & Belonging

In-group bias can be detrimental for communities and economic development. We study the causal effect of financial constraints on in-group bias in prosocial behaviors – cooperation, norm enforcement, and sharing – among low-income rice farmers in rural Thailand, who cultivate and harvest rice once a year. We use a between-subjects design – randomly assigning participants to experiments either before harvest (more financially constrained) or after harvest. Farmers interacted with a partner either from their own village (in-group) or from another village (out-group).

Diversity initiatives are designed to help workers from disadvantaged backgrounds achieve equitable opportunities and outcomes in organizations. However, these programs are often ineffective. To better understand less-than-desired outcomes and the shifting diversity landscape, we synthesize literature on how corporate affirmative action programs became diversity initiatives and current literature on their effectiveness. We focus specifically on work dealing with mechanisms that make diversity initiatives effective as well as their unintended consequences.

By integrating the intersectional invisibility hypothesis with the behaviors from intergroup affect and stereotypes map framework, we examine the extent to which Black women’s dual-subordinated identities render them nonprototypical victims of discrimination, relative to White women and Black men, and the corresponding consequences.

The extent to which men and women sort into different jobs and organizations, namely, gender differences in supply-side labor market processes, is a key determinant of workplace gender composition. This study draws on theories of congruence to uncover a unique organization-level driver of gender differences in job seekers' behavior. We first argue and show that congruence between leadership gender and organizational claims is a key mechanism that drives job seekers' interest.

Well-educated and prosperous, Asians are called the “model minority” in the United States. However, they appear disproportionately underrepresented in leadership positions, a problem known as the “bamboo ceiling.” It remains unclear why this problem exists and whether it applies to all Asians or only particular Asian subgroups. To investigate the mechanisms and scope of the problem, we compared the leadership attainment of the two largest Asian subgroups in the United States: East Asians (e.g., Chinese) and South Asians (e.g., Indians).

Women participate in cultural activities such as art, music, and literature at higher rates than men, yet as creative professionals, their career achievements tend to lag behind men’s. Scholars interested in this puzzle have largely focused on gender bias in the evaluations of audiences and other gatekeepers. In this paper, we identify differences in the relative novelty of creative products, which we argue are shaped by the conditions under which male and female artists produce their work.

We study whether early stage investors have gender biases using a proprietary data set from AngelList that allows us to observe private interactions between investors and fundraising startups. We find that male investors express less interest in female entrepreneurs compared to observably similar male entrepreneurs. In contrast, female investors express more interest in female entrepreneurs. These findings do not appear to be driven by within-gender screening/monitoring advantages or gender differences in risk preferences.

We review the literature on recent changes to US employment relationships, focusing on the causes of those changes and their consequences for inequality. The US employment model has moved from a closed, internal system to one more open to external markets and institutional pressures. We describe the growth of short-term employment relationships, contingent work, outsourcing, and performance pay as well as the success of social identity movements in shaping employment benefits.

We study optimal workforce and contract design for a firm that employs a team of two agents. The agents have possibly diverse demographic characteristics captured by their discount factors. We also study optimal team design for four agents with given discount factors—two with low discount factors and two with high discount factors—who are to be assigned to two teams and identify conditions under which diverse assignment is optimal.