Faculty Spotlight: Nina Buchmann

Nina Buchmann joins Berkeley's Economics department this year, bringing a research focus on gender inequality, social norms, and development economics — including work on paternalistic discrimination in labor markets and households across South Asia. PhD student Uyanga Byambaa sat down with Professor Buchmann to talk about her path from political science to economics, the surprising results behind her research in Bangladesh, and what she hopes to instill in the next generation of graduate students.

Before beginning your academic career, you had a range of professional experiences outside academia. Looking back, how did those experiences influence your decision to pursue economics and the research questions you study today?
That's an interesting question. I decided to pursue economics and an academic career relatively late. But I was always sure that I wanted to work on questions related to gender inequality and women's roles in society.

When I was in high school, I actually wanted to work at Interpol. I did a one-month internship at a police station in Paris, and at the time, my ideal career was to work on issues such as human trafficking and women's rights, particularly in low-income countries.

I started college studying political science, still with the idea that I might eventually work for an international organization or Interpol. I took economics as a minor, partly because my freshman advisor and friends encouraged me to study something more quantitative. I soon realized that economists were studying many of the same questions that interested me in political science, but approaching them differently. While political scientists often focus on institutions and power, economists have a set of tools that allow us to quantify relationships and patterns we observe in the real world. That quantitative approach really fascinated me and ultimately led me to switch to economics.

Before my PhD, I worked at the European Central Bank and the United Nations on economic issues. Initially, I thought I would pursue a PhD and then return to an international organization to work on women's issues. But toward the end of my time at the UN, and increasingly during my PhD, I began to understand the policy impact academics can have. Research can directly inform policy decisions, including those made by international organizations. Academia allows me to study novel questions on topics I'm deeply passionate about, while still having the potential to make a meaningful policy impact.

Your research combines economic theory with real-world field experiments. How does having a strong theoretical framework help you design better experiments and interpret their results?
There are different styles of doing research, and I think it's perfectly valid to first design an experiment and then try to make sense of the results, sometimes even writing a model after the experiment is complete. And not every paper needs a model either! 

For me personally, though, it is very helpful to start with a conceptual framework. Otherwise, my mind can go in a thousand different directions about what treatment arms I could include or what I could do in the experiment.

I like to begin by asking: What is the question? What model can help me answer that question? Which parameters would need to move for me to identify the mechanism I'm interested in?

Writing down a simple model helps me identify the parameters that should change if my hypothesis is correct. Then I can ask: What specific experiment can I design where I move that one thing that helps me answer my research question — and nothing else? Theory, in that sense, gives me discipline in designing the experiment and helps me interpret what the results mean.

Much of development economics has traditionally focused on constraints such as access to education, credit, or information. Your research also highlights the importance of social norms and beliefs. How has that shaped the way you think about development policy?
Economics has increasingly recognized that we are not simply homo economicus, making perfectly rational decisions all the time. We are shaped by our individual experiences, the societies in which we live, and the beliefs we hold - and those beliefs are not always rational.

Behavioral economics has become deeply integrated into economics, and we are increasingly thinking about how behavioral insights can help us understand questions in low-income countries. Social norms are not always considered part of behavioral economics, but they are closely related.

This shapes how I approach my research. Our economic behavior is influenced by our experiences and by the context in which we operate. So when we try to understand economic development - and particularly the role and opportunities of women in society - we cannot ignore social norms.

One example comes from my work on what we call paternalistic discrimination: discrimination that occurs while ostensibly having the best interests of the discriminated-against group in mind.

Consider an employer hiring for a night-shift job. The employer might say, "I don't like women," which would be standard taste-based discrimination. Or the employer might believe that women are less productive at night, which would be statistical discrimination. But there is another possibility that has received much less attention in economics: the employer might believe that working at night is too dangerous for women.

In our study in Bangladesh, we observe employers' hiring decisions for a night-shift job and vary whether employers know that women will receive safe transportation home after the shift. Employers are significantly less likely to hire women when they do not know that safe transportation is provided. Importantly, they respond more strongly to guaranteed safe transportation than to a subsidy given directly to workers that would allow women to purchase transportation themselves.

That is what makes the behavior paternalistic: employers are not simply allowing women to make their own decisions about safety. They are more willing to hire women when they know the women will take safe transportation.

This connects directly to social norms. Across many societies, there is a strong protective norm toward women. If that norm is powerful in other areas of life, why wouldn't it extend into the labor market? It illustrates why, even when studying markets and economic behavior, we cannot discount the role that social norms can play.

Across your research, has there been a finding that genuinely surprised you or challenged your expectations? How did it change the way you think about research?
One project that surprised me was our evaluation of a women's empowerment program in Bangladesh designed, in part, to delay child marriage.

If anything, we found that the empowerment program increased child marriage. Women who participated in the program married somewhat earlier, and their families faced a penalty in the marriage market: their parents had to pay higher dowries to the families of prospective grooms.

What seemed to be happening was related to an initially unobserved characteristic in the marriage market: how progressive or empowered a woman was perceived to be. Once an empowerment program operated in a village, prospective grooms could infer that women in that village were likely to be more empowered. Men who did not want an empowered bride could then respond to that information, creating a marriage-market penalty for women exposed to the program.

It was a striking example of how an intervention designed to improve women's outcomes can interact with existing norms and institutions in unexpected ways. It reinforced for me how important it is to understand the social environment in which policies operate rather than assuming that an intervention will have its intended effect in isolation.

What are you most excited to explore in your research over the next few years?
I've studied paternalistic discrimination in the labor market, and I'm now excited to explore paternalistic discrimination within the household. 

In one project, I'm studying whether paternalistic behavior within households can contribute to what I think of as a dependency trap. Across many societies, parents tend to be more protective of young girls than young boys. In countries where these norms are particularly strong, girls may become highly dependent on their parents during childhood. Parents may restrict their mobility or shield them from certain experiences with genuinely protective motivations.

But challenging situations can also be where people develop important skills - independence, decision-making, confidence, and the ability to navigate difficult environments. If girls are systematically protected from those experiences, they may have fewer opportunities to develop those skills.

The question I'm interested in is whether that protection can create a longer-term cycle of dependency: girls depend on their parents during childhood and later become more dependent on their husbands in adulthood. I'm interested in understanding whether behavior motivated by care and protection can unintentionally contribute to persistent gender inequality.

As you join Berkeley and begin mentoring the next generation of economists, what qualities do you hope to cultivate in graduate students? What advice would you give students hoping to make meaningful contributions to development economics?
I want to cultivate a willingness to ask big questions alongside the technical training students already receive. Economics has, for understandable reasons, placed enormous weight on mathematical rigor and careful identification. But when rigor becomes the primary filter, it can also raise a barrier that keeps out people who might bring genuinely interesting and exciting insights to the profession. So I encourage students to ask big questions, to look at familiar ideas differently, and to treat identification and technical rigor as tools in service of a good question rather than as ends in themselves.  

Where do those big questions come from? My advice to students is related: don't start by chasing a 'niche' in the literature. It's easy, especially in your third year, to lose a year to literature reviews, trying to find the one gap nobody has filled yet. I got this advice myself earlier in my PhD, and it stuck with me — treat the literature review as something you do last. The best ideas often come from observing things in the real world. My own work on paternalistic discrimination came from observing that kind of behavior directly in a workplace setting. That's not advice every field can take, but development economists are in a fortunate position: we can travel to low-income countries, engage with people there, and see firsthand what challenges they're actually facing. The most interesting research questions come from observing the real world — and for development economists, that means traveling, engaging, and really listening to people's experiences before deciding what to study.