Nina Buchmann

Graduate Student Research Funding | 2019 - 2020 Academic Year

Paternalistic Discrimination in Bangladesh - Evidence from the Lab and from the Field

Women in Bangladesh struggle to access the labor market, despite recent progress in education and training. Buchmann proposes two experiments to assess whether employers hire male candidates in order to protect women from potentially harmful jobs, which is called paternalistic discrimination. Initial results from a pilot survey suggest that paternalistic concerns, such as employee safety, are key reasons that some employers hire men over equally qualified women. In both a lab and a field experiment, Buchmann observes hiring decisions in order to measure paternalistic discrimination explicitly and assess its importance relative to other barriers to female labor force participation.

Nina Buchmann, Department of Economics

Nina Buchmann is a PhD student in economics at Stanford University. Her areas of interest include development economics and behavioral economics and she is particularly interested in issues related to gender, sexual assault and domestic violence. Prior to coming to Stanford, Buchmann worked as a research associate at JPAL/the Duke Development Lab and analyzed the impact of a large randomized control trial aiming to reduce child marriage and increase female empowerment in Bangladesh. She also worked as a consultant at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and the European Central Bank researching and evaluating the relationship between finance and development. Buchmann holds a BA in economics from Harvard University and an MA in development economics from Yale University.

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