Ruchi Mahadeshwar
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Economics
Brown University
ruchi_mahadeshwar@brown.edu
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I am a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Brown University, supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and the NIH T32 Fellowship. My primary fields are development and labor economics, with a focus on gender and firms. My CV is here.
I am on the job market in 2024-2025.
Job Market Paper
Outside Options and the Supply of Sex Work (with Alex Zhou)Job Market Paper
Abstract
Banning illicit markets is often ineffective and can yield unintended consequences. We conduct a field experiment to test whether improving returns to legal labor alternatives deters participation in the illegal sex market without adverse effects. We randomize two treatments designed to raise earnings from legal work for sex workers. Incentivizing legal labor increased its earnings by 20%, reduced sex work participation by 13%, and raised total earnings by 13%. The reduction in sex work is not explained by income effects, as a separate unconditional cash transfer had no impact. Using these results, we estimate intersector labor supply elasticities and calibrate a labor supply model. Elasticity estimates imply these jobs are substitutes, and the model calibration suggests that sex work carries 17 times the disutility of legal work.
Presentations
Working Papers
The Impact of Intra-household Income Hiding on Labor Productivity (with Alex Zhou)Abstract
Using a field experiment among garment factory workers in Cambodia, we estimate the effects of randomly disclosing spousal income on productivity in a standardized work task. Recent work has shown the significant effect of information asymmetry on spousal bargaining. However, the impact of this asymmetry on productivity, and subsequently the overall pool of resources available for bargaining, is often overlooked. We find that the disclosure of income significantly impacts how much income is earned compared to a nondisclosure scenario where spouses can decide the amount they report to their spouse, and, therefore, how it is allocated. The effects differ dramatically by gender: when income is disclosed to their spouses, women tend to decrease productivity. By contrast, men do the opposite: when income is disclosed, they increase productivity. We reconcile these findings with a model where spouses’ bargaining power and the cost of misreporting income determine their effort in anticipation of whether they can be the residual claimant of that income or be forced to bargain over it. Overall, this study sheds light on the unintended consequences of financial or pay transparency policies on both productivity and household inequality.
Presentations
Funders
Coverage
Dissecting Performance Pay: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in a Garment Factory (with Alex Zhou)
Abstract
Performance-based pay is often considered the "magic cure" for low productivity in many sectors. However, despite past studies supporting the effectiveness of performance pay in motivating individual worker effort, its overall impact on the organizational level remains uncertain, particularly given the long and multifaceted transition from the most common pay structure, fixed pay, to performance pay. This paper presents a unique natural experiment in the Cambodian garment manufacturing sector, where a large factory implements two major interventions that break down the mechanisms of the transition to performance-based pay system: a worker performance monitoring system and a performance-based wage scheme. Leveraging the staggered roll-out of these interventions, our findings reveal that both performance monitoring and performance pay significantly improve productivity. This improvement is driven not only by motivating individual effort but also by changing turnover rates among less productive workers and improving the alignment of workers with production lines.
Wealth of Information: The Economic Consequences of Enhanced Access to Diagnostics (with Kawango Agot and Harsha Thirumurthy)
Abstract
Information frictions are common in many markets. In areas with a high prevalence of both HIV and transactional sex, we examine the effects of new diagnostics that enable sexual partners to learn each other’s HIV status. We find that access to at-home HIV tests increases women’s income from transactional sex, without negatively affecting their health outcomes. The higher income stems from both more transactional sex and reduced condom use. The decrease in condom use occurs mainly with ex ante high-risk partners who test HIV-negative, suggesting that the new diagnostics enable women to overcome the risk-income trade-off associated with transactional sex.