Yuki Takahashi
Welcome to my website. 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 psychological factors and institutions affect
individual and group behaviors using experimental and observational data.
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
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 wellbeing. 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 wellbeing. Using difference-in-differences and flexibly controlling for macroeconomic shocks with unmarried, non-cohabitating 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 wellbeing, even if it is a light one, and highlight the importance of legal institutions in harnessing intimate partner violence.
Experimental economists have investigated the role of gender in dictator game allocation and found that men (and women) allocate more to women than to men. This paper introduces IQ as an additional dimension to gender and examines whether the allocation pattern of male dictators is reversed; that is, whether male dictators allocate less to female receivers than to male receivers when these receivers have higher IQs than dictators. By exogenously varying the IQ of receivers relative to that of dictators, I do not find evidence consistent with this conjecture; if anything, male dictators allocate slightly more to female receivers with higher IQs than to male receivers with higher IQs. The results hold both in mean and distribution. I argue that these findings have implications on whether smart women are penalized in the labor 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)
Curriculum Reform and Female Students' Major Choice (with Dede Long)
