Research Agenda

“How do institutional frictions and social norms distort the allocation of human capital and its value returns?”

Through an economic lens, I analyze women’s existential challenges and development choices across different life stages.

To address this question, my work builds upon a theoretical triad combining New Institutional Economics, Identity Economics, and Narrative Economics. I examine how formal institutional frictions and informal social norms—interwoven with social identities and cultural narratives—generate structural barriers in labor markets, organizational hierarchies, and individual decision-making.

Core Dimensions

I organize my observational and empirical inquiry across three central dimensions:

1. 🔍 Missing (Human Capital Paradox)

  • Workforce Exit & Invisibility: Tracing how macro-institutional shifts, market barriers, and privatized caregiving burdens drive female workforce exit, rendering educated talent unobserved in formal markets.
  • The Exit Mechanism: Opening the “black box of exit” to disentangle voluntary unpaid caregiving investments from structural workplace exclusion and motherhood penalties.

2. ⚖️ Misallocation (Distorted Incentives & Value Returns)

  • Talent & Credit Sorting: Evaluating how task assignment biases (Greedy vs. Glue work), credit expropriation (Matilda Effect), and cross-market penalties distort talent sorting, effort incentives, and value returns.
  • Aggregate Efficiency Losses: Quantifying aggregate productivity and welfare losses when institutional frictions and social prejudices prevent optimal talent allocation.

3. 📜 Social Norms (Informal Constraints & Narratives)

  • Informal Institutional Constraints: Unpacking how cultural expectations, gender role definitions, and internalized identities constrain individual choices and household bargaining.
  • Narrative Transmission: Investigating the mechanisms through which social norms and economic narratives reinforce persistent disparities in market outcomes.

Selected Research Projects

Ongoing Projects

  • Gender and Academic Credit Allocation [Work in Progress] (Jan. 2026 – Present)
    Examining asymmetric credit attribution in mixed-gender co-authored papers—specifically testing whether the scientific community systematically over-attributes research contributions to male co-authors while under-crediting female co-authors in team production.

  • Whose Economics? Gender Balance, Perspective Complementarity, and Knowledge Production in Top-Tier Economics [Research Proposal]
    Examining how gender representation and perspective complementarity among authors shape topic selection, research methodologies, and paradigm shifts in top-tier economics journals.