SYDNEE CALDWELL. HOME CONTACT INFORMATION 240 Sidney Street, Unit 313 Cambridge, MA Mobile:

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1 OFFICE CONTACT INFORMATION 77 Massachusetts Avenue, E HOME CONTACT INFORMATION 240 Sidney Street, Unit 313 Mobile: MIT PLACEMENT OFFICER Professor Benjamin Olken MIT PLACEMENT ADMINISTRATOR Mr. Thomas Dattilo DOCTORAL STUDIES Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) PhD, Economics, Expected completion June 2019 DISSERTATION: Essays on Imperfect Competition in the Labor Market DISSERTATION COMMITTEE AND REFERENCES Professor Daron Acemoglu 77 Massachusetts Avenue, E Professor David Autor 77 Massachusetts Avenue, E Professor Joshua Angrist 77 Massachusetts Avenue, E Professor David Card University of California, Berkeley Department of Economics 530 Evans Hall #3880 Berkeley, CA PRIOR EDUCATION University of California, Berkeley B.A., summa cum laude, in Applied Mathematics, Economics CITIZENSHIP United States GENDER: Female FIELDS Primary Field: Labor Economics Secondary Fields: Applied Econometrics, Personnel Economics, Public Finance

2 OCTOBER PAGE 2 TEACHING EXPERIENCE Econometrics (Graduate) Teaching Assistant for Professors Brigham Frandsen and Whitney Newey Economics Research and Communication (Undergraduate) Teaching Assistant for Professor Simon Jaeger Labor Economics II (Graduate) Teaching Assistant for Professors David Autor and Heidi Williams Spring 2019 (assigned) Spring 2019 (assigned) Spring 2016 RELEVANT POSITIONS Research Associate, MIT School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative (SEII) Research Assistant to Professors Joshua Angrist, David Autor and Amanda Pallais Visiting Student, UC Berkeley Center for Labor Economics Research Assistant to Professor David Autor Senior Research Analyst, Federal Reserve Bank of New York Research Assistant to Professor David Card FELLOWSHIPS, HONORS, AND AWARDS NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant Washington Center for Equitable Growth Doctoral Grant (#2) George & Obie Schulz Fund Grant 2015, 2016 Washington Center for Equitable Growth Doctoral Grant (#1) NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Fellowship Economics Dept. Citation (best undergraduate), UC Berkeley Earl Rolph Prize, UC Berkeley Highest Honors in Economics, UC Berkeley Phi Beta Kappa Regents and Chancellors Scholar, UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Alumni Association Leadership Award PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES Referee: AER: Insights, Quarterly Journal of Economics Conference and Seminar Presentations: UC Berkeley Labor Lunch, November 2018 ASSA Annual Meeting (Uber session), January 2018 Uber Economics Conference at University of Chicago, January 2017

3 OCTOBER PAGE 3 RESEARCH PAPERS Outside Options, Bargaining, and Wages: Evidence from Coworker Networks (Job Market Paper) (with Nikolaj Harmon) This paper analyzes the link between wages and outside employment opportunities. To overcome the fact that factors that affect a worker s outside options may also impact her productivity at her current job, we develop a strategy that isolates changes in a worker's information about her outside options. This strategy relies on the fact that individuals often learn about jobs through social networks, including former coworkers. We implement this strategy using employer-employee data from Denmark that contain monthly information on wages and detailed measures of worker skills. We find that increases in labor demand at former coworkers current firms lead to job-tojob mobility and wage growth. Consistent with theory, larger changes are necessary to induce a job-to-job transition than to induce a wage gain. Specification tests leveraging alternative sources of variation suggest these responses are indeed due to information rather than unobserved demand shocks. Finally, we use our reduced-form estimates to identify a structural model, to estimate bargaining parameters and investigate the relevance of wage posting and bargaining across different skill groups. Monopsony and the Gender Wage Gap: Experimental Evidence from the Gig Economy (with Emily Oehlsen) Firms with market power in the labor market may discriminate between workers based on their ability or willingness to leave for higher pay elsewhere. More elastic workers should therefore be paid more, a fact that may explain gender wage gaps. We use field experiments to estimate firm substitution elasticities for male and female ride-share drivers. Some drivers had better or more immediate alternatives than others. Changes in hours worked for drivers more and less able to substitute allow us to distinguish firm and market-level responses, and to distinguish hours from labor-market participation effects. Women have Frisch elasticities double those of men on both the intensive and extensive margins. Women also seem no less willing than men to switch firms in response to changes in relative wages. These results fail to support the hypothesis that gender differences in labor supply response are important for pay gaps for low-skilled workers. Uber vs. Taxi: A Driver s Eye View (with Joshua Angrist and Jonathan Hall) Ride-hailing drivers pay a proportion of their fares to the ride-hailing platform operator, a commission-based compensation model used by many internetmediated service providers. To Uber drivers, this commission is known as the Uber fee. By contrast, traditional taxi drivers in most US cities make a fixed payment independent of their earnings, usually a weekly or daily medallion lease, but keep every fare dollar net of expenses. We assess these compensation models from a driver's point of view using an experiment that offered random samples of Boston Uber drivers opportunities to lease a virtual taxi medallion that eliminates the Uber fee. Some drivers were offered

4 OCTOBER PAGE 4 a negative fee. Drivers' labor supply response to our offers reveals a large inter-temporal substitution elasticity, on the order of 1.2. At the same time, our virtual lease program was under-subscribed: many drivers who would have benefitted from buying an inexpensive lease chose to opt out. We use these results to compute the average compensation required to make drivers indifferent between ride-hailing and a traditional taxi compensation contract. The results suggest that ride-hailing drivers gain considerably from the opportunity to drive without leasing. Outside Options in the Labor Market (with Oren Danieli) This paper develops a method to estimate the outside employment opportunities available to each worker, and to assess the impact of these outside options on wage in- equality. We outline a matching model with twosided heterogeneity, from which we derive a sufficient statistic, the outside options index (OOI), that captures the effect of outside options on wages, holding productivity constant. This OOI uses the cross- sectional concentration of similar workers across job types to quantify the availability of outside options as a function of workers commuting or moving costs, preferences, and skills. Higher concentration in a narrower range of job types implies lower OOI and higher dispersion across a wide variety of job types corresponds to higher OOI. We use administrative data to estimate the OOI for every worker in a representative sample of the German workforce. We estimate the elasticity between the OOI and wages using two sources of quasi-random variation in the OOI, holding workers productivity constant: the introduction of highspeed commuter rail stations, and a shift-share ( Bartik ) instrument. Using this elasticity and the observed distribution of options, we find that differences in options explain 30% of the gender wage gap, 88% of the citizen-non-citizen wage gap, and 25% of the premium for higher education. Differences in options between genders and education groups are driven mostly by differences in the implicit costs of commuting and moving. Tax Refund Expectations and Financial Behavior (with Scott Nelson and Daniel Waldinger) Many economic models predict that consumption decisions today depend on beliefs about risky future income. We quantify one contributor to income uncertainty and study its effects: uncertainty about annual tax refunds. In a low-income sample for whom tax refunds can be a substantial portion of income, we collect novel survey evidence on tax filers expectations of and uncertainty about their tax refunds; we then link these data with administrative tax data, a panel of credit reports, and survey-based consumption measures. We find that while many tax filers have correct mean expectations about their refunds, there is substantial, and accurately reported, subjective uncertainty. Tax filers borrow moderate amounts out of expected tax refunds: for each dollar of expected refund, roughly 15 cents in revolving debt is repaid after refund receipt. This borrowing and repayment is less

5 OCTOBER PAGE 5 pronounced for more uncertain filers, consistent with precautionary behavior. The unexpected component of tax refunds is not used to pay down debt, but rather induces higher debt levels. Credit report and survey evidence both suggest that these higher debt levels are driven by newly financed durable purchases such as vehicles, illustrating how unexpected income can induce propensities to consume above 1 by relaxing down-payment collateral constraints. RESEARCH IN PROGRESS High Wage Firms and Entry-Level Labor Markets A recent literature has shown that a significant portion of an individual s pay depends on where she works. In this paper I examine whether access to high wage firms, early in one s career, has long-run consequences for employment or earnings. Because initial firm placement is endogenous, I use an instrumental variables strategy based on exploiting variation in the quality of available positions across different regions and occupations. Using administrative data from Germany, I find that individuals who get lucky in initial firm placement benefit in the long run in terms of earnings and firm quality. In ongoing work I am investigating three potential mechanisms: (1) human capital accumulation, (2) access to better job search networks, and (3) firms use of past firm quality as a signal of worker ability. Employee Referrals and Match Quality (with David Card) An extensive body of research assumes that employee turnover patterns and returns to job seniority are driven by the stochastic process of learning about the quality of the match between a worker and a firm. A related literature on referrals assumes that existing employees can provide a signal of the quality of prospective matches. In this paper we use unique data from LinkedIn on referrals made in response to employer-initiated recruiting drives to test whether the job duration and promotion histories of employees who make referral recommendations provide information on the expected quality of the job match for the people they refer. Specifically, we estimate the strength of the intergenerational correlation between measures of job success for employees who make a referral and those they recommend. We test whether this correlation is stronger when the referrer and the referee are from similar backgrounds (e.g., colleges), or work in similar areas (e.g. engineering versus non-engineering jobs).