I’m a PhD candidate in Economics at ETH Zurich. I visited Harvard Kennedy School as a Research Fellow for the Women and Public Policy Program from 2022-2024. I will be on the 2024-2025 Job Market.
I work on topics in labor and education economics. My research focuses on gender, specifically on understanding gaps between women and men in career choices and on studying the causes for the motherhood penalty in the labor market.
Prior to my PhD, I was a founding employee at Wingtra, a robotics startup based in Switzerland. Experiencing firsthand the challenges of building a gender-balanced engineering team led me to develop the project Edumap and ultimately to pursue a PhD in economics.
You can find a full CV here.
Ongoing Research
Does Exposure to Female STEM Professionals Reduce the Gender Gap in STEM Participation? (Job Market paper)
This study provides large-scale evidence on the impact of brief exposure to STEM professionals on high-school students' STEM participation in college. I link novel data on over 1,500 female and male speakers at 183 STEM promotion events to the educational trajectories of all high-school graduates in Switzerland. Using an event-study design, I find that event exposure increases STEM enrollment in college and leads to higher STEM graduation rates six years later. I then exploit event-level variation in speaker composition to show that events have a stronger impact when the share of female speakers is higher. This effect, however, applies to both female and male students, indicating that female speakers influence students through mechanisms beyond the commonly assumed role-model effect. Leveraging detailed data extracted from 4,000 presentation descriptions, I find that both female and male students respond positively to interactive presentations, which are more frequent among female speakers.
A Free Lunch? How Changing Childcare Defaults Increases Parental Labor Supply
I analyze a policy reform that shifts public lunchtime childcare in kindergartens and elementary schools in the city of Zurich, Switzerland, from an opt-in to an opt-out system. In the new system, children are automatically signed up for low-cost lunchtime childcare unless parents actively deregister their child. Leveraging the staggered rollout in an event-study design, I document that the policy increases public childcare enrollment by on average 2.3 additional hours per week, compared to a baseline of 6.0 hours. The policy increases the employment rate of mothers with children in kindergarten by 5% and total earnings by 7.7%, and has a small positive effect on the extensive margin of fathers. The effects are particularly pronounced among low-income families and parents born abroad. Investigating the underlying mechanism, I document that parents react to the default component of the policy, indicating that behavioral barriers play an important role in public childcare uptake.
Availability of Specialization Tracks and STEM Choice in High School
Draft available upon request.
I investigate how the availability of high-school specialization tracks affects students’ participation in STEM in high school. Using Swiss administrative data and a fixed-effects strategy, I compare STEM enrollment of students who have different high-school tracks available at the high school that is closest to their place of residence, while controlling for a large set of fixed effects. My results show that while male students are significantly more likely to enroll in a STEM track when the track is available, STEM track availability is not correlated with female students' choices. Conversely, both male and female students are more likely to enroll in STEM when the language specialization, the most popular non-STEM track, is not offered. My findings suggest that the structure of students' choice sets can be an important tool for increasing female students' STEM participation.
Policy & Other Projects
Edumap: Supporting Swiss High Schools With Data Insights to Reduce the Gender Gap in STEM
Project website: www.edumap.ch
This project is financed by the Swiss Federal Office for Gender Equality, Ernst Göhner Stiftung, and ETH Zurich.
High schools in Switzerland lack access to information on the tertiary study choices of their former graduates. The project addresses this gap by collaborating with the Federal Statistics Office to provide school leaderships through a new online platform with detailed data on the school-specific gender gap in STEM choice. For the project, I have acquired project funding of CHF 200,000 (USD 230,000), including funds for a pre-doc position. Several of my research projects build on the work done for Edumap
Introduction of the Job Registration Requirement
Report for the State Secretariat for Economics Affairs SECO. Joint with Andreas Beerli, Daniel Kopp, and Michael Siegenthaler. Report: PDF. Summary in die Volkswirtschaft.
We investigate how the Swiss cantons have implemented the Job Registration requirement, a policy that requires employers to register vacancies in occupations where the national unemployment rate is at least 5% with regional employment centres. We find a large heterogeneity in how cantons have implemented the policy.