Job Market Paper
When the Boss Thinks a Woman’s Place is Home: The Role of Religion in Employer Discrimination
(Under Review)
Winner of the UniCredit Foundation - best paper Award on Gender Economics 8th ed
There is ample evidence suggesting that employers discriminate against certain gender, race and religious minorities. However, whether religiosity matters in hiring decisions is ambiguous because employer preferences cannot be directly identified. Drawing an analogy between firms and Turkish municipalities, this paper tests for hiring discrimination based on gender and piety. Affiliation with the pro-Islamist party determines the religiosity of the employer and headscarves measure the piety of female employees. Religious
employers reduce female employment under a veiling ban when religious women cannot be distinguished. Consistently, lifting the ban increases female employment by religious employers, suggesting that pious females are favored. (Read)
Work in Progress
Out of Sight, Out of Mind? Electoral Responses to Proximity of Health Care (with Serkant Adıgüzel and Aslı Cansunar)
It is well established that voters reward incumbent politicians for distributive allocations. However, most of the evidence comes from aggregate measures of changes in the stock of the public goods and does not account for variations in accessibility to public services within administrative units. The objective of this paper is to show that increasing geographic proximity to a new public service increases electoral support for the incumbent party. We use the Family Medicine Program reform in Turkey, which gave rise to an exogenous variation in proximity to the local Family Health Centers, to show that voters whose distance to the nearest clinic have decreased are more likely to vote for the incumbent party. We also show that educated voters reward the incumbent when there is an increase in the quality of the service in the nearest Family Health Center, whereas less educated voters reward increasing proximity.
Parental Leave from the Firm's Perspective (with Marco Francesconi and Astrid Kunze)
This paper investigates labor demand effects of the extension of parental leave duration in Norway. We focus on whether and how firms adjust the gender composition of their workforce when the opportunity costs of certain types of workers rise. Using rich employer-employee data, we uncover that firms substitute potential mothers and fathers with older workers. Our results demonstrate potentially undesirable consequences of parental leave for women, even when some leave is provided for men.
Corporate Culture and Productivity: Results from a Randomized Intervention on Firms (with Sule Alan, Mert Gumren and Matthias Sutter.