I am an applied microeconomist and am mainly interested in the interaction of social safety net programs with labor markets.
I am a PhD candidate in Economics at CERGE-EI. During my PhD years, I visited the University of Chicago (invited by D. Black), the Institute for Employment Research (M.Moritz), and the Dutch National Bank (C. Biesenbeek & M. Mastrogiacomo).
CV: access here
E-mail: sona.badalyan.v@gmail.com ; sona.badalyan@cerge-ei.cz
Research
"Firm Response to Raising Women's Retirement Age"
Awards: 1st prize at the Young Economists Seminar (Croatian National Bank)
Presented at: EWMES (scheduled); IAB Brown Bag Seminar; IAB DiskAB; EALE; IZA Summer School; ESPE; Dutch National Bank; Young Economists Seminar (Croatian National Bank); SITES; AIEL; CERGE-EI Brown Bag Seminar; Student Workshop at Harris School of Public Policy at UChicago; BSE Summer School; Armenian Economic Association annual meeting
“Household Shocks and Children’s Labor Market Outcomes”
(with C. Biesenbeek & M. Mastrogiacomo)
[in coding stage]
"Coworker Peer Effects in Retirement"
[in coding stage]
Presented at: CERGE-EI Applied student lunch
"Coordinated Retirement Decisions with Firms: The Role of Worker Substitutability"
Worker turnover can be costly for firms due to imperfect worker substitutability in the labor market. Therefore, it is important to understand how worker substitutability affects employment behavior at an older age, and mediates the labor supply reactions to retirement age increase. By combining the literature on worker substitutability with that on labor supply effects of retirement reform, I show that older workers with fewer potential substitutes in the internal labor market (by coworkers) or the external labor market (by new hires) are more likely to continue working when faced with higher retirement age. Based on a regression discontinuity design corresponding to a shift in the early retirement age, the findings suggest that workers internalize and mitigate some of their employer’s costs of finding suitable replacements.
[draft available upon request]
Presented at: AIEL
"Disclosure Discrimination: An Experiment Focusing on Communication in the Hiring Process"
(with D.Korlyakova & R.Rehák)
We focus on communication among hiring team members and document the existence of discrimination in the disclosure of information about candidates. In particular, we conduct an online experiment with a nationally representative sample of Czech individuals who act as human resource assistants and hiring managers in our online labor market. The main novel feature of our experiment is the monitoring of information flow between human resource assistants and hiring managers. We exogenously manipulate candidates' names to explore the causal effects of their gender and nationality on information that assistants select for managers. Our findings reveal that assistants disclose more information about family and less information about work for female candidates relative to male candidates. An in-depth analysis of the disclosed information suggests that gender stereotypes play an important role in this disclosure discrimination. Furthermore, assistants disclose less information about foreigners overall. This effect appears to be driven by the less attention assistants are willing to devote to the CVs of foreigners, measured by the extra effort to learn more about the candidates.
Presented at: pregame in the team of John List at UChicago