My name is Neeraja Gupta and I defended my dissertation a few weeks ago. I was on the job market this year and am going to join University of Richmond as Assistant Professor of Economics.
I am a behavioral and experimental economist with research interests in gender and labor economics. In my research I seek to understand the role of behavioral biases in determining market outcomes and how these biases can affect the efficacy of public policy. I am particularly interested in exploring the influence of gender stereotypes on labor market outcomes for women. Additionally, I have research in the area of experimental methodology. Much of my current work requires the use of lab and online experiments as well as theoretical and causal inference tools.
I presented my job market paper at Stanford Institute of Theoretical Economics - the experimental economics session in August last year. In this paper I examine if a temporary affirmative action policy can improve representation of women beyond the immediate scope of the policy in settings where employers hold biased beliefs about performance of women. In absence of affirmative action in such settings, incorrect beliefs can perpetuate due to less hiring of and subsequent learning about performance of women. Using a real effort task where women are inaccurately believed to be worse performers than men, I experimentally elicit employer beliefs and hiring choices for worker performance in two experimental treatments: a control with no restriction on hiring and a temporary affirmative action for women workers. I find that while hiring choices and beliefs are biased against women in the control treatment, temporary affirmative action treatment leads to improvement in representation of women even after the policy is lifted. Further, employers who are most likely to discriminate against women show the fastest reduction in gender bias in beliefs which in turn determines their hiring choices change in favor of women due to the temporary affirmative action treatment.
I want to take this opportunity to thank Dr. Kraft for his financial support in making this conference presentation possible. This conference involved only plenary sessions where pioneers in the field participated and listened to all presentations. I was fortunate to have been given this opportunity to showcase my research on such a platform and it greatly helped me get recognition as a researcher in the field.