Rachel Heath

Why do Firms Hire using Referrals? Evidence from Bangladeshi Garment Factories

I argue that firms use referrals from current workers to mitigate a moral hazard problem. I develop a model in which referrals relax a limited liability constraint by allowing the firm to punish the referral provider if the recipient has low output. I test the model’s predictions using household survey data that I collected in Bangladesh. I can control for correlated wage shocks within a network and correlated unobserved type between the recipient and provider. I reject the testable implications of models in which referrals help firms select unobservably good workers or are solely a nonwage benefit to providers.

Women's access to labor market opportunities, control of household resources, and domestic violence

While there are many positive societal implications of increased female labor force opportunities, some theoretical models and empirical evidence suggest that working can increase a womans risk of suffering domestic violence. Using a dataset collected in peri-urban Dhaka, this analysis documents a positive correlation between work and domestic violence. This correlation is only present among women with less education or who were younger at first marriage. These results are consistent with a theoretical model in which a woman with low bargaining power can face increased risk of domestic violence upon entering the labor force as a husband seeks to counteract her increased bargaining power. By contrast, husbands of women who have higher baseline bargaining power cannot resort to domestic violence since their wives have the ability to leave violent marriages. These findings are inconsistent with the models of assortative matching in the marriage market, expressive violence, work in response to economic shocks, or underreporting of domestic violence. The results on age at marriage are also inconsistent with the implications of a reverse causality model in which women enter the labor force to escape violent situations at home, although the results on education are consistent with that story.

Bridging the gap : identifying what is holding self-employed women back in Ghana, Rwanda, Tanzania, the Republic of Congo, and Uganda

This paper explores the determinants of the gender gap in income earnings in five Sub-Saharan countries: the Republic of Congo, Ghana, Rwanda, Uganda, and Tanzania. It shows that first, self-employment tends to provide marginally lower average income (with the exception of Ghana and men in Rwanda) and much higher variability in income compared with wage work. Women on average earn less than men when they are self-employed and in wage employment, but also have less volatile earnings. The analysis uses quantile decomposition methods and finds that the differences in observable choices and endowments explain the gender gap in earnings for the self-employed who earn the least while the gap for the most successful male and female entrepreneurs is largely driven by differences in returns to observable covariates in the majority of the countries. These results suggest a glass ceiling effect, wherein a large portion of the income gaps between high-earning men and women cannot be explained by observable characteristics. The paper concludes by looking at the variables that account for a larger portion of the gender gap explained by observable characteristics and finds that hours of work and industry explain a higher fraction compared with standard human capital and demographic factors such as age and education.