Research

Working Papers

It’s Not About the Money - Or Is It? Stereotypes and the Gender Application Gap
Single-authored
Abstract

Despite substantial gains in women’s education and labor market participation, women remain underrepresented in leadership positions, which sustains gender pay gaps at the top of the wage distribution. A key potential supply-side factor is a gender gap in applications for leadership and higher-paying roles. With salaries becoming increasingly observable at the moment of application, understanding their role in application behavior is important. In a laboratory experiment, I study the following three aspects: I i) study the role of different salary levels on the gender application gap, ii) examine underlying mechanisms and iii) test a potential solution to mitigate any salary-induced gender application gap. I find a substantial gender gap in the willingness to pay only for highly paid positions: women are less willing than men to seek these roles despite performing equally well as leaders. Higher salaries shift the perceived stereotype of leadership from female-typed to male-typed, primarily among men, which is associated with their greater willingness to lead. The tested solution, randomly assigning leadership experience, does not, on average, reduce the gender application gap, suggesting that experience alone is insufficient to overcome instilled stereotypes.

Work in Progress

Onboarding, Matching, and Employee Turnover - A Field Experiment
with Dirk Sliwka and Timo Vogelsang
Abstract

We evaluate how a low-cost onboarding practice at the beginning of the employment affects turnover among newly hired frontline employees. In partnership with a large German retail chain, we ran a field experiment across more than 900 stores and 2371 new hires (August 2024 - July 2025). Treated stores implemented a structured welcome intervention: managers announced the newcomer in advance and hosted a brief social event with their colleagues on the first day, while control stores continued with business-as-usual onboarding. The intervention increases separations in the first month of employment by about 2 percentage points while cumulative separations over three and six months are largely unchanged, in line with the view that the intervention accelerates mutual learning about match quality. Both stayers and movers in the treatment group have higher working hours indicating that the treatment also fostered employee motivation.

  • Data collection completed
  • Draft available upon request

AI or human? Applicants’ decisions in discrimination settings
with Luisa Santiago Wolf and David Stommel

Building Better Managers for the Future of Work
with David J. Deming, Joe Vecci, and Ben Weidmann

  • Design stage