From January 6 to January 8, 2023, Belinda Archibong, assistant professor of economics, participated in the American Economic Association’s (AEA) Annual Meeting in New Orleans. Each year, the AEA meeting, in conjunction with 64 associations in related disciplines, asks researchers to present new achievements on a wide variety of economic topics. With over 13,000 researchers in attendance, the meeting is considered one of the premier arenas to present economic research to colleagues. As an expert in policy intervention, Archibong presented along with esteemed colleagues in four separate sessions focused on ways to close gender gaps in labor markets, environmental justice, labor coercion, and labor markets in Africa.
In the first session, “Interventions to Close Gender Gaps: What Works and What Can Backfire,” Archibong discussed her work that studies the effects of information frictions on gender gaps in matching and hiring in online labor markets. Archibong’s next session, “New Perspectives on Environmental Justice,” highlighted her research focusing on the effects of sudden exposure to epidemics on human capital outcomes using evidence from the African meningitis belt. In the following two sessions, “Race, Ethnicity, and Labor Coercion” and “Income, Labor, and Trade in Africa,” Archibong participated as a discussant on a variety of topics, including Stalin’s ethnic cleansing campaigns, enslaved workers in the antebellum United States, and trade and youth labor market outcomes.