Yuki Takahashi
I am a postdoctoral researcher at Tilburg University.
I am an applied microeconomist working in the areas of Behavioral Economics, Gender Economics, and Labor Economics.
My research examines how biases, stereotypes,
and institutions distort individual and group behaviors and proposes
policy solutions.
I primarily use laboratory and field experiments.
I received my PhD in Economics from the
University of Bologna in July 2022.
I am non-binary (pronoun: they/them). You can find my CV here.
Email: y.takahashi@uvt.nl
Twitter: @yukitakahashi11
Bluesky: @yukitakahashi.bsky.social
Working papers
Collaboration is integral in workplaces but also involves correcting one's colleagues, which can cause interpersonal friction, especially when women correct men. Using a pre-registered, quasi-laboratory experiment, I show that men are no less willing to collaborate with a woman than a man who corrected them regardless of the correction quality. However, the exploratory analysis shows that people are less willing to collaborate with others who have corrected them, even if the correction was high quality. Thus, although women correcting men does not cause larger interpersonal frictions, correcting colleagues is costly and can be detrimental to group efficiency and peer learning.
The decision to arrest men who abuse their partner is often at the police officers' discretion, especially when the abuse is not serious. However, such light abuse may accumulate and deteriorate women's welfare. This paper uses Russia's criminal law reform that decriminalized light domestic and non-domestic violence as a natural experiment to study the effect of decriminalization of light intimate partner violence on married women's welfare. Using difference-in-differences and flexibly controlling for macroeconomic shocks with unmarried women as a control group, I find that the reform decreased married women's life satisfaction and increased depression. The effect size is similar for college-educated women and women in high-qualified occupations who may be more sensitive to general violence norms. The likely mechanism is that the reform muted married women because the law no longer protected them from their partners' light abuses: while unmarried women began to express less tolerance toward intimate partner violence, married women did not. Also, married or unmarried men did not change their tolerance significantly, suggesting that the effect is women-specific. These findings suggest that decriminalizing intimate partner violence decreases married women's welfare, even if it is a light one, and highlights the importance of legal institutions in harnessing intimate partner violence.
Are men less generous to a woman with a higher IQ in a non-romantic setting? I test this question using a dictator game experiment with a novel design that exogenously varies the receivers' gender and relative IQ. Based on a sufficiently powered analysis, I do not find that men are less generous to a woman whose IQ is higher than theirs; if anything, they are slightly more generous to a higher-IQ woman than a higher-IQ man. In addition, I do not find that women are less generous to a woman with a higher IQ either. The results hold both in mean and distribution, and are not driven by the so-called ``beauty premium.'' These results suggest that although men (and women) care about their IQ very much and dislike smarter women in the marriage market, the men's dislike does not manifest outside the marriage market.
Work in progress
Attention Discrimination in Performance Evaluation (with Jan Hausfeld and Boris van Leeuwen)
Are Men Driving Away Women from STEM Fields? (with Chihiro Inoue and Asumi Saito)
Teaching
