Hervé, Justine
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Publication Busy Bees: How Does Conscientiousness Affect Labor Market Outcomes?(2024-02-07) Hervé, Justine; Purcell, Helene; Mani, SubhaPersonality traits play an important role in shaping labor market outcomes, but the associated behaviors that lead to these differences are understudied. In this paper, we examine the returns to the Big Five personality traits as well as the mechanisms through which personality affects employment and earnings. We find conscientiousness to be a significant predictor of both employment and earnings. We further show that the association between conscientiousness and earnings operates primarily through one specific behavior, namely, higher work intensity. Additionally, we are able to rule out selection into specific job types as potential channels for the positive relationship between conscientiousness and earnings.Publication Gender Gaps in Cognitive and Noncognitive Skills: Roles of SES and Gender Attitudes(2021-01-01) Hervé, Justine; Mani, Subha; Behrman, Jere R.; Nandi, Arindam; Lamkang, Anjana Sankhil; Laxminarayan, RamananGender gaps in skills exist around the world but differ remarkably among the high and low-and-middle income countries. This paper uses a unique data set with more than 20,000 adolescents in rural India to examine whether socioeconomic status and gender attitudes predict gender gaps in cognitive and noncognitive skills. We find steep socioeconomic and attitude gradients in both cognitive and noncognitive skills, with bigger effect sizes for the socioeconomic status (SES) gradients. Our results suggest that a sizable improvement in gender attitudes would yield important gains for females, but substantial gains would come only from large improvements in household socioeconomic status. Overall, the household socioeconomic and cultural environment is significantly associated with the gender gaps in both cognitive and noncognitive skills.Publication Food Coma is Real: The Effect of Digestive Fatigue on Adolescents' Cognitive Performance(2024-04-12) Hervé, Justine; Mani, Subha; Behrman, Jere; Laxminarayan, Ramanan; Arindam, NandiFood coma, also known as postprandial somnolence, is a commonly cited reason for experiencing reduced alertness during mid-afternoon worldwide. By using exogenous variation in the timing of tests and, hence, by extension, plausibly exogenous variation in the temporal distance between an individual’s last meal and the time of test, we examine the causal impact of postprandial somnolence on cognitive capacities. Analyzing novel time use data on ∼ 4,600 Indian adolescents and young adults, we find that testing within an hour after a meal reduces test-takers’ scores on English, native language, math, and Raven’s tests by 8, 8, 8, and 16 percent, respectively, compared to test-takers who took the tests more than an hour after their meal. We further find that the negative effect of postprandial somnolence on cognition operates through increased feelings of fatigue and depletion of cognitive resources that become more pronounced while dealing with more challenging test questions.