Lisa Ho

I am a postdoctoral associate at the Yale Economic Growth Center with Inclusion Economics. I received my PhD in Economics from MIT in 2024. I will join Columbia University's Department of Economics as an assistant professor in 2025.

Research

Working Papers

Bringing Work Home: Flexible Work Arrangements as Gateway Jobs for Women in West Bengal (with Suhani Jalota and Anahita Karandikar)

There is a large latent workforce in developing countries that consists of hundreds of millions of women who prefer to have paid work and yet are out of the labor force. Often, available job opportunities are incompatible with traditional gender roles that encourage women to stay at home. In a field experiment with 1,670 households, we partner with a jobs platform to offer short-term data work to women who are out of the labor force. We find three main results. First, flexible work-from-home jobs are highly effective at bringing women into paid work. Job flexibility more than triples take up from 15% for an office job to 48% for a job that women can do from home while multitasking with childcare. Second, these jobs can act as a stepping stone to less flexible work. Trying paid work from home increases take up of less flexible jobs two to three months later by 5 percentage points. “Gateway jobs” are especially important for women from more traditional households: their labor supply is more likely to be marginal to job flexibility, and in turn, work experience shifts their attitudes to become less traditional. Third, from the labor demand side, remote work comes with trade-offs in terms of worker performance, causing a 4% decrease in accuracy and a 20% decrease in speed. However, these drawbacks are likely outweighed for employers by the high value women place on the ability to work from home.

What Works for Her? Why Work-from-Home Digital Jobs Affect Female Labor Force Participation (with Suhani Jalota)

We randomly assigned 3,200 married, out-of-labor-force women in Mumbai to a job offer either from home or from an office, cross-randomizing them to one of three monthly wage levels (low, medium, high). We find that 56% of women start the work-from-home job. Despite offices being female-only spaces that permit children within a 5-minute walk of women's homes, only 27% take up the office jobs, matching India’s female labor participation rate. Surprisingly, even wages that would double household income increase job take up by only 8 percentage points. A parallel experiment with husbands shows that men's labor supply is more responsive to wages and is not responsive to job location. A follow-up experiment to uncover mechanism finds that adding a requirement for a 2-minute daily check-in at the office decreases home-based job take-up by 25% (explaining half the home-office difference), driven by women from more traditional households. Taken together, the experiments suggest that even beyond practical constraints, norms of domesticity—the expectation that a woman's place is at home—constrain female labor supply in India. Without changes to these norms, home-based jobs may represent the most immediate path to increase their labor force participation.

Featured in: VoxDev podcast, Alice Evans' Rocking Our Priors, MIT News, Development Impact Blog

Got Beef with Beef? Evidence from a Large-Scale Carbon Labelling Experiment (with Lucy Page)

Food systems account for approximately one-third of total greenhouse gas emissions, and simple shifts across food choices can yield large cuts in emissions. In a randomized field experiment with over 200,000 meal kit customers in the US, we find that carbon footprint labels cause customers to choose lower-emission meals, and that the introduction of labels has positive effects on customer retention and company profits. Both the reduction in emissions and the increase in profits are driven by customers with high baseline beef consumption. We find evidence that the labels act through salience rather than knowledge, and that the effects on meal choices depend on whether customers’ values are aligned with the mission to address climate change through behavioral change.

The Impact of 3G Mobile Internet on Educational Outcomes in Brazil (with Pedro Bessone and Ricardo Dahis)

What is the impact of mobile broadband internet on children's test scores? We compare standardized test scores before and after the staggered entry of 3G into Brazil's 5,570 municipalities using a heterogeneity-robust event-study design. We find no effects of mobile internet on test scores for 5th or 9th grade students, and can reject effect sizes of 0.04 standard deviations in both math and Portuguese. Taken together, our results indicate that the arrival of high-speed mobile internet is not sufficient to improve educational outcomes either through direct take-up by individuals or through broader changes to the economy.

Selected Work in Progress

The Effects of Mandated Maternity Leave on Young Women’s Labor Market Outcomes (with Garima Sharma, Shreya Tandon, Stephanie Hao, and Pulak Ghosh)

[ slides available upon request ]

Funded by The Weiss Fund

We study the effect of a maternity benefits law in India which extended the mandatory length of benefits that firms had to provide from 12 weeks to 26 weeks. Using data from the Employees Provident Fund Organization, a panel data set from which we infer salary information over time for the universe of formal workers in India with monthly pay of Rs 15k or less, we examine whether the new law affected firms’ propensity to hire new female workers as well as the impacts on the career progression of incumbent workers.

The Brotherhood of The Traveling Pants: Evidence from Employers in Jordan (with Nina Buchmann, Paolo Falco, and Andreas Menzel)

[ slides available upon request ]

Funded by IGC

Empowerment at Scale: Effects of Rural Workfare on Women in General Equilibrium (with Urmi Bhattacharya, Erica Field, Rohini Pande, Simone Schaner, and Charity Troyer Moore)

Funded by FID, GIF, and USAID

Papers

Learning from Job Offers About Labor Supply Constraints (with Suhani Jalota and Anahita Karandikar)

Prepared for AEA Papers and Proceedings 2025

Labor market surveys often include individuals outside the workforce, but respondents who lack work experience may have inaccurate beliefs about their labor supply preferences and constraints. Using data from an incentivized job preferences elicitation in West Bengal, India, we show that women who are out of the labor force make costly mistakes in assessing whether they would take up future hypothetical jobs. Receiving an employment offer and navigating the subsequent decision process improves women’s prediction accuracy. Heterogeneity analysis is more consistent with learning about external constraints such as other household members’ preferences rather than internal constraints such as own abilities.

Are Some Firms Better for Women’s Careers? (with Garima Sharma, Shreya Tandon, Stephanie Hao, and Pulak Ghosh)

Prepared for AEA Papers and Proceedings 2025

This paper examines whether some firms are systematically better at advancing women's careers, focusing on India's corporate sector. Using an identification strategy based on firms' first recruitment events at universities, we compare women who join top-ranked female-friendly firms to peers from prior cohorts. Drawing on LinkedIn career histories, we find that women who start at these firms are significantly more likely to remain at their initial employer, advance to management positions, and take on roles requiring abstract tasks. These effects persist eight years after graduation, suggesting that early placement at supportive firms can have lasting impacts on women's career trajectories.

The Impact of Large-Scale Social Media Advertising Campaigns on Covid-19 Vaccination: Evidence From Two Randomized Controlled Trials (with Emily Breza, Abhijit Banerjee, Arun G. Chandrasekhar, Fatima Cody Stanford, Renato Fior, Kelly Holland, Emily Hoppe, Louis-Maël Jean, Lucy Ogbu-Nwobodo, Benjamin A. Olken, Carlos Torres, Pierre-Luc Vautrey, Erica Warner, Esther Duflo and Marcella Alsan)

AEA Papers and Proceedings 2023

COVID-19 vaccines are widely available in wealthy countries, yet many remain unvaccinated. We report on two studies (United States and France) with millions of Facebook users that tested two strategies central to vaccination outreach: health professionals addressing common concerns and motivating "ambassadors" to encourage vaccination in their social networks. We can reject very small effects of any intervention on new first doses (0.16 pp, United States; 0.021 pp, France), with similar results for second doses and boosters (United States). During the Omicron wave, messaging aimed at the unvaccinated or those tasked with encouraging others did not change vaccination decisions.