Essays in microeconomics
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation consists of three chapters that explore topics in behavioral economics and gender economics. In chapter 1, I study how motivated reasoning distorts the inference process about the signaling sources. In the experiment, two signal sources differ in terms of their stringency. Specifically, each source applies a different standard in deciding whether to send a favorable signal about an agent's task performance. Participants were more likely to guess that their favorable signals came from the stringent source relative to a Bayesian. Moreover, the bias is only present when the signal is ego-relevant, suggesting the role the bias plays in confidence management. A second experiment investigates the long-term implications of this bias. In Chapter 2 (joint work with Sarah Eichmeyer, Muriel Niederle, and David Yang), we evaluate the causal effects of gender portrayals in primary school textbooks on female education and labor market outcomes. In the context of China, we study a curriculum reform that reduced the use of gender stereotypes and induced a more equal representation of male and female characters in textbooks used in primary school grades 1-6. For identification, we exploit the staggered roll-out of the new textbooks across counties in the early 2000s, in combination with sharp changes in exposure to the new textbooks across cohorts. In Chapter 3 (joint work with Muriel Niederle, Markus Mobius and Emanuel Vespa), we study who comes to mind when agents have to rely on their memories to recommend candidates. We hypothesize that candidates that show up more frequently are more easily recalled than others. This sheds light on a new mechanism that can give rise to the `missing candidate' problem and homophily in hiring practices, distinct from statistical or taste-based discrimination against out-groups. We also vary whether the objective criteria are known to the agent before or after seeing the candidates. We expect to see better quality of recommended candidates in the former which may allow for more efficient memory encoding and retrieval. Lastly, we also vary how many candidates the agent needs to recommend. The hypothesis is that the requiring agents to recommend more people will force them to recall more candidates who would otherwise not be as easily recalled, leveling the playing field.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2022; ©2022 |
| Publication date | 2022; 2022 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Li, Yunqi |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Niederle, Muriel |
| Thesis advisor | Niederle, Muriel |
| Thesis advisor | Bernheim, B. Douglas |
| Thesis advisor | Fafchamps, Marcel |
| Degree committee member | Bernheim, B. Douglas |
| Degree committee member | Fafchamps, Marcel |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Economics |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Yunqi Li. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Economics. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2022. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/rp670tf0474 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2022 by Yunqi Li
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...