Working Papers

Unequal Gains: The Gendered Impact of Trade Liberalization in Vietnam (Job Market Paper)

Latest Draft

This paper examines how trade liberalization affected gender wage inequality in Vietnam following the 2001 U.S.-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA), which triggered a sharp and plausibly exogenous reduction in U.S. tariffs on Vietnamese exports. Exploiting cross-provincial variation in exposure to the BTA , constructed from pre-liberalization industry composition and industry-specific tariff cuts, and estimating a triple difference-in-differences specification, I find that provinces more exposed to the BTA experienced a modest but statistically significant widening of the gender wage gap. A one-standard-deviation increase in trade exposure led to an additional 0.8 percent decline in women’s wages relative to men’s. This gender penalty is concentrated among women in state-owned enterprises and among high skilled, married, older, and rural women, underscoring the role of social norms and gender role attitudes in shaping women’s labor market outcomes in response to economic opportunities from trade liberalization.

Work in Progress

Assessing Bias in Hypothetical Ability Ratings

with Italo Lopez Garcia, Nicole Maestas & Kathleen Mullen

Persistent disparities in labor market outcomes across gender and racial/ethnic lines raise important questions about the role of biased perceptions of ability based on demographic characteristics. We use experimental data from the 2024 American Work Capacity and Ability Survey (AWCAS) to examine whether systematic differences exist in perceived cognitive ability ratings of hypothetical individuals, whose gender and racial identities are signaled through randomly assigned names. Our empirical strategy, pre-registered before accessing the data, allows for flexible estimation of gender, racial, and intersectional biases, with additional exploration of heterogeneity by respondent characteristics and the accuracy of self-assessment.

U.S. - China Trade War: Implications for Vietnam

with Anca Cristea & Hoang Pham