Shamyla this american life trial#

Imagine an early adolescent raised in suburban Maryland suddenly finding herself in an ultra-traditional Pakistani family, with all the expectations about a woman’s subordinate status and a woman’s reputation. As the original arrangement had never been formalized, the adoptive parents could do nothing. When the adoptive parents went on to have two sons, however, Shamyla’s birth parents kidnapped her on a 1989 trip to Pakistan when she was 11. The program’s theme was “The Weight of Words.” As is apparently sometimes the custom in Pakistan, Shamyla was given by a younger sister to her elder when the latter, living in America, appeared incapable of having children. (See my account here.) The radio program reported on how Little Women came to the aid of an American-raised girl who was kidnapped and held by Pakistani relatives.

Ira Glass’s recent This American Life episode about a classic novel coming to someone’s rescue reminds me of Morning Edition’s account of Anna Karenina doing the same for an unjustly imprisoned Somali prisoner. Brenoe (UZH) and C.Steve McCurry portrait of Afghan refugee in Pakistan Leonardi (Statale di Milano)Į xperimentation and career choices: evidence from Swiss apprenticeships (piloting) Unwilling to reskill? Evidence from a survey experiment with Italian jobseekers (data collection) Memory, Trauma and Economic Behavior Among Refugees: Experimental Evidence from Teaching “Positive Imagery” in Ethiopia (analysis) Value Dissonance at Work - draft available soon!īeyond Bonuses: the incentive effect of a prosocial initiative on bankers (analysis) Our results suggests that training which ignores the emotional content of economic activity is not as effective as that which leverages the emotions inherent in economic decisions.įunding: IPA P&R Exploratory Grant, IGA-Rockefeller Research and Impact Fund, J-PAL PPE, IPA P&R, J-PAL GEA Improved entrepreneurial outcomes appear to be driven by enhanced ability to obtain credit, build savings, and undertake creative marketing with customers and competitors. Women in the imagery training improve along all margins compared to men, and are negatively impacted by traditional business training. For individuals with high levels of baseline trauma, imagery addresses their deficit in positive imagery. In follow-up surveys conducted 8 and 14 months after the intervention, those who participated in the imagery training demonstrated a strengthened capacity for using visualization and significantly improved economic outcomes compared to the placebo.

Shamyla this american life trial#

Second, we design a training curriculum to teach visualization skills, and test it using a randomized control trial in which the same entrepreneurs were given access to either the imagery-based entrepreneurial training program, a placebo program of traditional business skills training, or no program at all. First, using a data set of roughly 2,000 would-be entrepreneurs in Colombia, we show that measures of imagery use correlate strongly and positively with economic outcomes. We also highlight that the use and impact of this ability is highly heterogeneous depending on people’s life experiences, and it has the potential to benefit vulnerable populations the most. We show evidence of the path and importance of imagery-based decision making for the vital economic activity of entrepreneurship. Recent work in neuroscience and psychology has underscored the impact of visualizing future scenarios on decision making, via mental simulation, emotional amplification, and consolidation of memory. Learning to see the world’s opportunities: The impact of mental imagery on entrepreneurial action

Out-of-trial surveys suggest that the experimental information changed the expected premium on the job for talented relative to untalented workers. The net impact of the informational intervention is positive for the employer even after accounting for spillovers on female applicants and hires. In contrast, being informed of a lower share of high evaluations encourages men to apply, improves the quality of male applicants and enables the employer to hire and retain more talented men.

I find that a male photograph does not affect men's applications. I introduce exogenous variation in the content of recruitment messages to potential applicants in two ways: showing a photograph of a current worker (randomized to be a man or a woman) and providing information on the share of workers who got high performance evaluations in a past year (randomized to be higher or lower). I embed a field experiment within the UK-wide recruitment program for social workers to analyze barriers to men's entry into traditionally female-dominated sectors. IZA Discussion Paper 14083 - UniCredit Foundation Best Paper Award on Gender Economics (2021) Revise and resubmit at the American Economic Review Breaking Gender Barriers: Experimental Evidence on Men in Pink-Collar Jobs