Assistant Professor
Department of Economics, Boston University
I am a labor economist working on topics including gender and inequality, social norms, and methodology for empirical work.
Linh
Tô
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Abstract
Using administrative data on NYC yellow taxis around the September 4, 2012 fare increase and cross-vendor payment interfaces that hold displayed tip percentages constant, we document five facts about tipping. Higher bases raise tips even among non-default tippers; fare increases raise tip dollars but reduce tip ratios; identical dollar increases move tips more under lower bases; tolls crowd out tips when excluded from default bases but crowd in when included; and riders share unexpected fare windfalls with drivers. A simple model with a default-based norm and convex pain of paying rationalizes these facts and highlights design implications for digital tipping.
BibTeX
@article{thakralto2026five,
title={Five Facts about Tipping},
author={Thakral, Neil and T{\^o}, Linh T},
journal={Mimeo},
year={2026}
}
Abstract
We study how preferences and beliefs sustain a culture of misbehavior in a Youth Reformative Training Center (RTC). Although most youths privately oppose institutional offenses, they underestimate peers’ support for positive behavior. In a population-level randomized controlled trial, publicly revealing peer attitudes narrowed this belief gap and sharply reduced offenses, even among youths with accurate priors. New entrants, unexposed to the treatment, showed no comparable improvement, highlighting the role of public learning. The results demonstrate that social norms are dynamic and fragile: they can shift quickly when peer beliefs are revealed but erode just as fast when turnover disrupts shared knowledge.
BibTeX
@article{leong2025fragility,
title={The Fragility of Social Norms: Evidence from a Youth Reformative Training Center},
author={Leong, Kaiwen and Li, Huailu and T{\^o}, Linh T},
journal={Mimeo},
year={2025}
}
Abstract
This paper proposes that the marginal propensity to consume out of windfalls depends on a new state variable, the time horizon over which households anticipate receiving payments. We test this using a natural experiment from the randomized disbursement dates of a U.S. fiscal stimulus payment and assess external validity using randomized controlled trials on unconditional cash transfers in Kenya and Malawi. The data show evidence of excess anticipation-dependence: Consumption responds more to receiving additional income after a shorter anticipation duration, beyond what standard models predict. While households receiving stimulus payments do not increase spending in advance, additional consumption expenditure in the month after receiving payment drops over 40 percent for each additional week a household awaits payment. We estimate a mental-accounting model that incorporates this novel form of history dependence and discuss policy implications. Our approach reconciles conflicting results that consumption responds to anticipated payments in some settings but not others.
BibTeX
@article{thakralto2025excess,
title={Excess Anticipation-Dependence in Consumption},
author={Thakral, Neil and T{\^o}, Linh T},
journal={Mimeo},
year={2025}
}
Abstract
This paper provides field evidence on how reference points adjust, a degree of freedom in reference-dependence models. Examining this in the context of cabdrivers’ daily labor-supply behavior, we ask how the within-day timing of earnings affects decisions. Drivers work less in response to higher accumulated income, with a strong effect for recent earnings that gradually diminishes for earlier earnings. We estimate a structural model in which drivers work towards a reference point that adjusts to deviations from expected earnings with a lag. This dynamic view of reference dependence reconciles conflicting “neoclassical” and “behavioral” interpretations of evidence on daily labor-supply decisions.
BibTeX
@article{thakralto2025excess,
title={Excess Anticipation-Dependence in Consumption},
author={Thakral, Neil and T{\^o}, Linh T},
journal={Mimeo},
year={2025}
}
BibTeX
@article{thakralto2026child,
title={Child Penalty and an Age-Old Problem},
author={Thakral, Neil and T{\^o}, Linh T},
journal={Mimeo},
year={2026}
}
Abstract
We present a compensating wage differentials model that incorporates complementarity and substitutability in firms’ provision of amenities and workers’ preferences for them. These interactions help explain why some amenities tend to be bundled, while others are more often traded off. Our empirical analysis examines amenity substitution in the US labor market using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 cohort. We highlight how shorter or more flexible total work hours are traded off with other workplace amenities. Our findings suggest that women may need to forgo amenities they value to secure shorter, more flexible work hours.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{garro2025work,
title={Work Hours and Amenity Trade-Offs},
author={Garro-Mar{\'\i}n, C{\'e}sar and Thakral, Neil and T{\^o}, Linh T},
booktitle={AEA Papers and Proceedings},
volume={115},
pages={282--286},
year={2025},
organization={American Economic Association 2014 Broadway, Suite 305, Nashville, TN 37203}
}
Abstract
We investigate how the same hiring opportunity leads to different labor market outcomes for male and female full-time workers. Using administrative data from Germany spanning 1981 to 2016, we analyze firms’ wage-setting behavior in response to exogenous vacancies caused by sudden worker deaths. By identifying external replacement workers, we compare positions that, ex-ante, are equally likely to hire a male or female worker. Our analysis shows that female replacement workers’ starting wages are, on average, 11 log points lower than those of equally productive male counterparts. This gap is unlikely to be explained by differences in hours, within-firm adjustments, or outside options. Instead, the results suggest that firms may statistically discriminate by gender and that differences in worker bargaining plays an important role. The gender hiring opportunity gap is lower in contexts where gender equality norms are stronger. These findings suggest that a significant portion of the gender wage gap originates within firms at the hiring stage, contributing to our understanding of the mechanisms behind persistent gender disparities in wages.
BibTeX
@article{illing2025hiring,
title={Hiring and the Dynamics of the Gender Gap},
author={Illing, Hannah and Schwank, Hanna and T{\^o}, Linh T},
journal={Mimeo},
year={2025}
}
Abstract
This paper studies the distribution of workplace flexibility in the labor market and its sources. We collect information on which workers have workplace flexibility along three dimensions, flexible location, flexible scheduling of hours, and flexible total number of hours worked. Low-wage workers can choose to work part-time more flexibly but have a significant disadvantage when it comes to flexible location and scheduling. We overcome challenges in measuring individual-level willingness-to-pay (WTP) by using an adaptive discrete choice experiment, finding WTP for all three dimensions of workplace flexibility to be relatively flat across the wage distribution. Differences in preferences thus cannot account for the facts, suggesting that workers may face unequal compensating prices to obtain the same workplace amenity. We microfound this relationship with a model in which workplace flexibility interacts with production processes that utilize labor inputs at different skill levels. Using a structural model of compensating differentials, we quantify that unequal amenity prices explain 7.2% of wage inequality and 8% of total utility inequality. The results highlight that the unequal distribution of workplace flexibility contributes to the widening of wage inequality even in the presence of compensating differentials.
BibTeX
@article{drakethakralto2025flexibility,
title={Wage Differentials and the Price of Workplace Flexibility},
author={Drake, Marshall, and Thakral, Neil and T{\^o}, Linh T},
journal={Mimeo},
year={2025}
}
Abstract
This paper evaluates the hypothesis that, in setting wages, firms respond to costly signals by workers when such costs are informative of their values to the firms. For workers who become mothers, uncertainty about their future values can influence firms’ decisions to distribute career and promotion opportunities. Consequently, workers may forgo paid parental leave even when there is no human capital depreciation associated with taking leave. I build a signaling model with a continuous choice of leave period when such choice is restricted due to the maximum allowed paid leave duration. Using administrative data from Denmark and a parental leave policy extending the maximum allowed duration of parental leave, I show how a leave extension affects wages, hours, and promotion opportunities for workers whose signaling ability changes with the extension. In contrast to human capital theory, an individual can take longer leave but gain in wages when the larger choice set allows more workers to signal their type. The paper provides evidence of the labor market consequences of parental leave-taking due to signaling and the importance of asymmetric information in shaping parental leave choice.
BibTeX
@article{to2018signaling,
title={The Signaling Role of Parental Leave},
author={T{\^o}, Linh T},
journal={Mimeo},
year={2018},
keywords={asymmetric information, statistical discrimination, wages, labor supply}
}
BibTeX
@article{thakralto2026child,
title={Child Penalty and an Age-Old Problem},
author={Thakral, Neil and T{\^o}, Linh T},
journal={Mimeo},
year={2026}
}
Abstract
Data transformations often facilitate regression analysis, yet many commonly used transformations make hypothesis testing misleading because the results change with the measurement units of the data. We demonstrate both theoretically and using data from a randomized experiment that popular transformations approximating the logarithmic function but accommodating non-positive data can drastically alter regression conclusions when simply changing units, producing findings that are uninformative at best or highly misleading at worst. Our main result characterizes the family of transformations yielding measurement-unit-independent conclusions through an equivalence theorem that links scale-invariant t-statistics, scale-equivariant coefficient estimates, and scale-invariant semi-elasticities with logarithmic and power transformations.
BibTeX
@article{thakralto2025when,
title={When Are Estimates Independent of Measurement Units},
author={Thakral, Neil and T{\^o}, Linh T},
journal={Mimeo},
year={2025}
}
Abstract
This paper develops a framework for estimation and inference to analyze the effect of a policy or treatment in settings with treatment-effect heterogeneity and variation in treatment timing. We propose a two-stage difference-in-differences (2SDD) estimator that compares treated and untreated outcomes after removing group and period effects identified using untreated observations. Our regression-based approach enables us to conduct inference within a conventional GMM asymptotic framework. It easily facilitates extensions such as dynamic treatment effects, triple differences, continuous treatments, time-varying controls, and violations of parallel trends. Simulations of randomly generated placebo laws in state-level wage data demonstrate that 2SDD outperforms alternatives in terms of precision and rejection rates. Under homogeneous treatment effects, 2SDD yields similar standard errors as TWFE regressions, unlike other heterogeneity-robust estimators. Analyzing the rate of extreme t-statistics and outlying standard errors for various methods across seven empirical applications.
BibTeX
@article{gardner2025two,
title={Two-Stage Differences in Differences},
author={Gardner, John and Thakral, Neil and T{\^o}, Linh T and Yap, Luther},
journal={Mimeo},
year={2025}
}
Abstract
We propose the use of a dynamic choice experiment method, which we call Bayesian Adaptive Choice Experiment (BACE), to elicit preferences efficiently. BACE generates an adaptive sequence of menus from which subjects will make choices. Each menu is optimally chosen, according to the mutual information criterion, using the information provided by the subjects’ previous choices. We provide sufficient conditions under which BACE achieves convergence and show that its convergence rate significantly improves upon existing discrete choice methods with randomly generated menus. We show that it achieves the highest possible rate of convergence whenever preferences are deterministic. Given that BACE requires the calculation of a Bayesian posterior as well as the solution to a non-trivial optimization problem, several computational challenges arise. We address such challenges by using Bayesian Monte Carlo techniques and provide a package for researchers to employ. The separation between a front-end survey interface and a back-end computational server allows the BACE package to be portable for research designs in a wide range of settings.
BibTeX
@article{drake2025bayesian,
title={Bayesian Adaptive Choice Experiments},
author={Drake, Marshall and Payr{\'o}, Fernando and Thakral, Neil and T{\^o}, Linh T},
journal={Mimeo},
year={2025}
}