Claudio Schilter - RESEARCH

Working Papers

“Dynamically Optimal Treatment Allocation” (with Karun Adusumilli and Friedrich Geiecke )

How should we assign candidates to job training - or, more generally, any treatment? In practice, individuals often arrive sequentially and the planner faces various constraints such as limited budget/capacity, borrowing constraints, or the need to place people in a queue. In such settings involving inter-temporal trade-offs, previous work on devising optimal policy rules in a static context is either not applicable, or is sub-optimal. We show how one can use offline observational data to estimate an optimal policy rule that maximizes expected welfare in this dynamic context. We allow the class of policy rules to be restricted for legal, ethical or incentive compatibility reasons. The problem is equivalent to one of optimal control under a constrained policy class and we exploit recent developments in Reinforcement Learning to propose an algorithm to solve this. We also characterize the statistical regret and find that it decays at a n-1/2 rate in most examples; this is the same rate as in the static case.

“How Selectivity Shapes Selection”

This field experiment investigates how stressing selectivity at career information events affects the diversity, size, and quality of the applicant pool. While the total number of applications remains unaffected by stressing selectivity, it reduces the share of female participants and children of migrants in the applicant pool. A key mechanism driving this effect is that treated participants perceive their (also treated) peers as more competitive during the event. Leveraging treatment timing, I find that exposure to such peer behavior significantly contributes to the gender-specific effect of stressing selectivity. Moreover, further analysis reveals that stressing selectivity deters high-quality female participants from applying and attracts low-quality male participants. The results point to de-emphasizing selectivity as a simple way of boosting diversity, particularly when potential applicants interact with one another.

“Competitive Peers: The Way to Higher Paying Jobs?” (with Samuel Lüthi and Stefan Wolter)

We merge experimental data on competitiveness of a large sample of students with their complete educational history for up to ten years after the initial assessment. Exploiting quasi-random class assignments, we find that having competitive peers as classmates makes students choose and secure positions in higher-paying occupations. These occupations are also more challenging and more popular. On the cost side, competitive peers do not lead to a lower probability of graduating from the subsequent job-specific education, but they significantly increase the probability of requiring extra time to do so.

“Hate Crime after the Brexit Vote: Heterogeneity Analysis based on a Universal Treatment”

I investigate the change in hate crimes targeting the victim's race or religion after the Brexit vote. My results reveal a substantial and transitory increase in such crimes following the vote. The central focus of my analysis is the considerable spatial heterogeneity of this increase. Areas with a greater increase in hate crime are characterized by both a greater immigrant share, and higher income proxies. Differences in unemployment rates do not significantly contribute to the observed variance. More specifically, parsimonious linear prediction models show the shares of recent immigrants and people with formal qualifications as key predictors of the hate crime increase. My findings are consistent with treating the Brexit vote as an update of expected social sanctions to hate offenders. Issues of multiple hypothesis testing and model selection limit the use of classic methods; therefore I apply and adapt recent machine learning methods as well.

Reject and Resubmit, European Economic Review

Work in Progress

“Trying out Counter-Stereotypical Jobs: Evidence from Apprenticeships” (with Anne Brenøe, Alexia Delfino, and Stefan Wolter)

In Switzerland, more than half of the people do a three- to four-year apprenticeship after secondary school. Virtually all students inform themselves via trial apprenticeships during which they can try a job for 1 to 3 days. Even though boys and girls perform similarly in secondary school, their choice of apprenticeships - and subsequent occupations - differ massively. Girls are often found in health care occupations like nursing, while boys predominantly opt for technical jobs like computer science. When choices follow stereotypes, society misses out on a potentially great number of female engineers and male nurses. We will conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to explore whether encouraging teenagers to try out jobs, which are uncommon for their own gender (“counter-stereotypical”), can help them make more informed choices. Further, we aim to analyze if this leads to a better match between adolescents’ talents and the apprenticeships they choose.

Data collection in progress; received CHF 175250 in fuding from SERI

“The Effect of Automation on Firm-Based Training” (with Christian Gschwendt)

We survey companies in Switzerland that provide firm-based training and present them hypothetical scenarios about future work task automation. Not surprisingly, the shorter the time until task automation starts and the higher the proportion of tasks that are automated, the larger the reduction in firm-based training. Crucial to our analysis is the heterogeneity in the firms' reactions. For this, we divide firms according to profit and investment motif with regard to offering training, their exposure to recent innovations in AI versus previous innovations, and their size; and we divide the apprenticeship occupations into cognitive or manual as well as having high language or math requirements.

Analysis in progress; received CHF 10800 in funding from the IMG Foundation

“Beyond the Paycheck: Do Fringe Benefits Shape Gendered Career Choices” (with Thea Zöllner)

Can job amenities help overcome gendered occupational choices? We conduct a discrete choice experiment to examine whether (1) offering amenities increases the likelihood of choosing a job offer and (2) amenities associated with boys (girls) encourage them to select counter-stereotypical occupations. Using data from a leading Swiss apprenticeship platform, we tailor choice sets to participants’ relevant occupations. We test three mechanisms: firms offering amenities may signal broader workplace characteristics, amenities may alter the identity implications of occupational choices, and students may face social pushback from parents and peers.

Data collection in progress