Misum Open Seminar with Nina Buchmann

About the speaker: 

Nina Buchmann is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Research Program in Development Economics at Princeton during the 2025-2026 year. In 2026, she will start as an Assistant Professor in the Economics department at UC Berkeley. She was a Postdoctoral Associate at the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics at Yale University during the 2024-2025 academic year and received her PhD in Economics from Stanford in 2024. Her primary fields are development economics and behavioral economics. 

Read more about her research here. 

Title: Paternalistic Discrimination

Abstract: 

We combine two field experiments in Bangladesh with a structural labor model to identify paternalistic discrimination, the differential treatment of two groups to protect one group, even against its will, from harmful or unpleasant situations. We observe hiring and application decisions for a night-shift job that provides worker transport at the end of the shift. In the first experiment, we use information about the transport to vary employers' perceptions of job costs to female workers while holding taste-based and statistical discrimination constant: Not informing employers about the transport decreases demand for female labor by 21%. Employers respond more to transport information than cash payments to female workers that enable workers to purchase transport themselves. In the second experiment, not informing applicants about the transport reduces female labor supply by 15%. In structural simulations, paternalistic discrimination has a larger effect on gender employment and wage gaps than taste-based and statistical discrimination.  

Please register for the seminar here.