Advancing research in community: Postdoctoral scholars present their work

Postdoctoral scholars in economics at Yale spend 1-2 years contributing to an intellectual community that fosters fresh thinking and dialogue on challenges in global development. On November 8, six postdocs – four from the Economic Growth Center and two from the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE) – presented their research at an EGC Postdoctoral Retreat, covering topics as varied as electrification, intimate partner violence, gender quotas, and healthcare staffing. 

These postdoctoral positions offer early-career economists an opportunity to develop their research. "My time at the Economic Growth Center has given me the intellectual freedom, resources, and collaborations to explore new research questions about the role of restrictive gender norms in low-income countries,” postdoctoral scholar Nina Buchmann said. “And New Haven absolutely exceeded my expectations.”  

This was the second of two retreats in fall of 2024, and it featured the work of Buchmann and fellow EGC postdocs Patrick Agte, Maria Kogelnik, and Meital Peleg Mizrachi – as well Y-RISE postdocs Eric Hsu and Mitchell VanVuren. Y-RISE is based at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale. To read more about our first retreat on October 4, click here. 

Millions of adults in low- and middle-income countries die from treatable conditions every year. In rural India, 40% of deceased adults received no medical attention before death. Healthcare reforms tend to focus primarily on maternal and child healthcare, meaning that while child survival rates have increased, a persistent gap in elderly life expectancy between rich and poor countries remains. EGC postdoctoral associate Patrick Agte’s recent research considers one important lever governments can use to improve the quality of care for adults: increasing levels and quality of public healthcare staffing.  

Agte has taken advantage of a staggered rollout of a new healthcare policy in Rajasthan, which added healthcare workers to rural village clinics primarily staffed by midwives, to study the impact of large-scale public sector staffing expansions on market behavior and health outcomes. Of particular interest is the response of private health providers to this increased competition. “Governments often don’t have the ability to enforce quality standards in the private sector,” Agte said. “But they can intervene by investing in the public sector.”  

Agte is a postdoctoral associate working on the Gender and Growth Gaps Project and Inclusion Economics initiative, as well as research projects on school choice in Latin America. He received his PhD in Economics from Princeton University in 2023. “EGC has provided me with fantastic opportunities to make progress with my research, connect with new people, and learn from some of the leading experts in the field of development economics,” Agte said. “I have greatly benefited from being part of the vibrant EGC community and participating in a wide range of seminars, workshops, and conferences.” 

In Bangladesh, 25% of women experienced intimate partner violence (IPV – sexual, physical, or psychological abuse or aggression within romantic relationships) within the last year. The likelihood of IPV is negatively correlated with income: lower-income men are more likely to use violence towards their partners. But interventions like cash transfers have often failed to reduce IPV. As an alternative mechanism to alter men’s behavior, EGC postdoctoral scholar Nina Buchmann is studying the effect of entertainment-based educational campaigns (“edutainment”) – in this case, a soap opera. 

Buchmann, along with colleagues at Queens University, the University of Dhaka, and BRAC University, has theorized a “signaling” model of violence, wherein men use violence strategically to prevent their wives from deviating from normative behavior (such as shouting or leaving the house without permission) and maintain their self-esteem or public reputation. The use of violence can also be non-strategic, occurring when a man “loses control” after his wife deviates from normative behavior. Buchmann’s project will screen three different versions of a soap opera to different groups of participants. One version is focused on changing social norms around social behavior (“strong men don’t use violence”); another incorporates mental resilience messaging; and the third is a placebo. Participants who view the soap operas will do so either in private or in public. Buchmann will then survey the participants to assess any reduction in their  violent behavior over time. 

Buchmann is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Yale Economic Growth Center and the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics during the 2024-2025 Academic Year. She received her PhD in Economics from Stanford University and will join UC Berkeley's Economics Department in 2026 after a postdoc at Princeton. 

Electricity affects virtually every industry and is a driver of household and industrial change. However, those changes appear to be occurring unevenly in different settings. Eric Hsu is using electrical outage data from Nairobi, Kenya to better understand the impact of electrification on socioeconomic outcomes in low- and middle-income countries.  

One leading explanation for the mixed impact of electrification is simple: electricity access is often counted in a binary way, when the reliability of that access may also be crucial. To quantify the economic effects of improved electricity reliability, Hsu will draw on feeder-level outage data in the greater Nairobi area. He’ll also conduct interviews with utility personnel and survey firms and households. At the retreat, Hsu discussed the scope of this early-stage project with fellow researchers and heard from peers who have lived and worked in areas where electrical outages are common.  

Hsu is a postdoctoral associate and lecturer at Yale University, affiliated with the MacMillan Center and Y-RISE. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley. 

Gender quotas reserve a share of positions – in politics, corporate management, academia, and elsewhere – for underrepresented groups. While they are widely used, they’re also highly controversial. “We suspect that part of this controversy may be due to a fundamental misunderstanding of what quotas do,” says EGC postdoctoral scholar Maria Kogelnik. Together with Yale economist Philipp Strack, she experimentally studies ego-related biases and cognitive errors that arise when people reason about quotas.  

In the experiment, STEM undergraduate students were incentivized to perform well on a math test. They were randomly placed into groups of ten candidates, with a 50/50 gender split. Three of these candidates were selected for a $20 prize with the following treatment variation. In the NoQuota treatment, the three highest ranked candidates received a prize, regardless of their gender. In the Quota treatment, however, a women’s quota had to be fulfilled and at least one of the prizes had to be given to a woman.  

There was no gender gap in math performance, meaning that in the vast majority of cases, at least one woman was among the three highest ranked candidates, and the quota thus had no effect. But with the quota in place, both men and women had a distorted perception of their own and others’ abilities. Women who got selected dramatically overestimated the probability that they had only gotten selected because of the quota. Men who did not win overestimated their chances of winning in a non-quota system. “If you’re disappointed with your own outcome, you may blame it on the quota to sustain a positive self-image,” Kogelnik said. “You misperceive the effect of the quota and then you misperceive the ability of others, particularly those who don’t have the same group attributes as you.”   

Kogelnik is a Postdoctoral Associate at the EGC and the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, working on the Gender and Growth Gaps project. Previously Kogelnik held positions as postdoctoral researcher at CREED at the University of Amsterdam and a Tinbergen Institute fellow. Kogelnik received her PhD in Economics at UC Santa Barbara.  

“EGC provides an enriching intellectual environment to advance my research on how behavioral mechanisms and beliefs shape gender disparities,” said Kogelnik. “There are wonderful opportunities for collaboration.” 

The global fashion industry creates 92 million tons of waste annually. Meital Peleg Mizrachi’s research focuses on the urgent environmental and economic impact of the sector, focusing largely on Ghana as the world’s largest importer of used clothing. However, for the retreat, she turned a lens on American fashion consumption. “Consumers are the ones driving the fashion industry, and consequently the pollution caused by it,” said Mizrachi. 

Fast fashion is defined as garments and accessories produced by international corporations under a uniform global fashion model and sold at relatively low prices. The volume and affordability of these kinds of goods has risen along with rates of consumption. In the United States, consumers often consider secondhand clothing a sustainable alternative. Nearly 70% of respondents in Mizrachi’s country-wide survey had bought secondhand clothing in the last year. However, even among “sustainability-oriented” consumers, fast fashion purchases and overconsumption habits remain common. Mizrachi attributes this behavior to consumers’ limited awareness of personal impact and the idea of “moral licensing,” wherein sustainable behavior in one area permits unsustainable behavior in another. Simply buying more secondhand clothing, Mizrachi warns, is not a “guilt-free, perfect solution” to the environmental impacts of fashion consumption. 

Meital Peleg Mizrachi is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Economics at Yale University, where she conducts research in the realm of sustainable fashion with a particular focus on regulation and textile waste. She holds graduate degrees with honors in Public Policy (MA and PhD) from Tel Aviv University.  

"My postdoctoral training at Yale was a great academic experience, teaching me about economics, policy, climate, and academia,” Mizrachi said. “It makes me incredibly happy to see the work at Yale on sustainable fashion, including at the Center for Business and the Environment, and to advance work in this critical area." 

Policymakers in developing countries have aimed to create “good jobs” by reducing the obstacles that job seekers face in their search for employment. The idea behind these policies is that job seekers are often poor, and high barriers to search force them to rely on self-employment and other forms of informal labor in order to make ends meet, rather than searching for more lucrative employment. But the efficacy of these policies is unclear, particularly for low- and middle-income countries. Mitchell VanVuren, has used data from an experiment in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to generate a model that recommends a new optimal labor policy specifically for developing economies.

The policy VanVuren explored was a cash subsidy covering some of the costs of looking for a job (typically a minibus ticket). He considered the key features of Addis Ababa’s developing economy – namely, high levels of self-employment and substantial financial constraints on households and firms. He then created a new search-and-matching model and found that the optimal policy in a developing economy like Addis Ababa’s is a tax that substantially increases the cost of search, rather than a subsidy. In practical terms, this suggests that policies that are aimed at assisting those engaged in self-employment, such as a self-employment subsidy, are more effective than policies aimed at encouraging these same workers to search instead.

VanVuren is a Postdoctoral Associate at Y-RISE. His work combines microdata, experimental results, macroeconomic models, and new computational techniques. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of California, San Diego. 

“Our postdoc retreats are an opportunity to hear from early-career economists on how they are investigating some of the most interesting and important topics in development,” said Aishwarya Lakshmi Ratan, EGC’s Deputy Director. “These researchers are using compelling data sets and novel approaches –  job search patterns and incentives in Ethiopia , drivers of intimate partner violence in Bangladesh, responses in behavioral games, and large-scale administrative data from government partners – to skillfully investigate challenging areas and explore practical solutions. It is refreshing to see this careful and current ideation in attacking poverty and inequality.”