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Haruka Uchida

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Concealing candidate identities during evaluations, or "blinding", is often proposed as a tool for combatting discrimination. I study how blinding impacts candidate selection and quality, and the forms of discrimination driving these effects. I conduct a natural field experiment at an academic conference, running each submitted paper through both blind and non-blind review. Four years after the experiment, I collect proxy measures of paper quality—citations and publication statuses—for each paper and link it to the experimental data. I find that blinding significantly reduces scores for traditionally high-scoring groups, and consequently alters the composition of applicants who are accepted to the conference. Despite these compositional changes, blinding does not worsen the conference's ability to select high-quality papers. I develop a model of evaluator discrimination that allows me to rationalize these effects and decompose non-blind disparities into two distinct forms of discrimination: accurate statistical discrimination and bias.

John A. List, Haruka Uchida

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An unsettling stylized fact is that decorated early childhood education programs improve cognitive skills in the short-term, but lose their efficacy after a few years. We implement a field experiment with two stages of randomization to explore the underpinnings of the fade-out effect. We first randomly assign preschool access to children, and then partner with the local school district to randomly assign the same children to classmates throughout elementary school. We find that the fade-out effect is critically linked to the share of classroom peers assigned to preschool access-with enough treated peers the classic fade-out effect is muted. Our results highlight a paradoxical insight: while the fade-out effect has been viewed as a devastating critique of early childhood programs, our results highlight that fade-out is a key rational for providing early education to all children. This is because human capital accumulation is inherently a social activity, leading early education programs to deliver their largest benefits at scale when everyone receives such programs.