I am an applied microeconomist with interests in behavioral and development economics. My research seeks to understand factors that contribute to poverty and poor health.

Working Papers

  1. Schubert, Alexandra V. and Jenny Wang. "Self-Detrimental Avoidance of Rest." UZH Working Paper Series, 472.
    Awarded Ronald Fisher Prize for Best Pre-Tenure Paper at the 2025 AFE Conference.
    [Abstract]
    Across many cultures, resting instead of working is viewed as a barrier to higher earnings. This belief is also reflected in many canonical economic models. Recent empirical evidence highlighting the productivity benefits of rest challenges this belief. Yet, existing work tends to ignore individuals’ demand for restful activities and whether it aligns with their returns. In the context of an online labor market experiment in South Africa, we explore whether workers capitalize on the returns to short rest periods. After eliciting demand for rest, we estimate returns to rest for the same individuals and find that mandated rest boosts productivity by 0.3 standard deviations, thus making up for forgone earnings from resting. At the same time, only 19% of workers voluntarily choose to rest. Contrary to the notion of selection on returns, workers with high financial returns to rest do not select into rest. We provide suggestive evidence that misperceived financial returns are driving the disconnect between demand for and returns to rest. Our results provide proof-of-concept evidence that individuals may be misallocating effort between resting and working and could reach higher overall utility by working less. This highlights the importance of understanding misperceptions around rest, especially in light of the economic burden of long-term costs of overworking such as burnout.
    [Draft]
  2. Bohr, Clement E., Charles A. Holt, and Alexandra V. Schubert. "A Behavioral Study of Retirement Savings Accounts: Roth versus Traditional" Working Paper 440, University of Zurich.
    [Abstract]
    Motivated by a popular perception that Roth accounts are welfare-improving for most people, this paper compares the effects of mandated Traditional (tax-deferred) or Roth (taxprepaid) retirement policies in a controlled laboratory setting. Selection effects, which complicate analyses of observational data, are avoided by random assignment to policies. Subjects receive exogenous incomes during “working” periods, followed by no-income “retirement” periods. In each period, subjects decide how many lab dollars to convert into “takehome pay,” akin to consumption with diminishing returns. Subjects’ decisions determine retirement savings and tax payments. Flat income and tax-rate profiles facilitate the analysis of behavioral factors like present-period tax avoidance, while optimal consumption and after-tax savings are identical for both treatments. Our results show that observed savings are suboptimal in both treatments and are influenced by gender, patience, and risk aversion measures. In contrast to conventional wisdom, there are no significant differences between policies; if anything, the Traditional treatment leads to marginally higher post-retirement consumption.
    [Draft]
  3. Schubert, Alexandra V., Uyanga Byambaa, William Dow, Alden Gross, Jean Ikanga, Matthew Jukes, Jinkook Lee, Eric Ochieng, Michael Walker, Samuel Zicheng Wang, and Edward Miguel. "Intergenerational Transmission of Cognitive Skills across Generations: Evidence from Kenya"
    [Abstract]
    Cognitive skills contribute to human capital and economic growth. It is thus important to understand how cognitive skills evolve and what affects their transmission between generations. Previous research has shed light on this in Western, high-income countries. Yet little is known about how these findings apply to lower-income country settings as well. Leveraging repeated Raven's test scores spanning 25 years in the Kenya Life Panel Survey (KLPS), we investigate the intergenerational transmission and stability of cognitive skills. Starting when respondents were adolescents to newly-collected data on respondents' children, we document that the correlation of cognitive skills between parents and children is low--and lower than in higher-income countries or than predicted by expert forecasts. Longitudinal data allow us to rule out that this was driven by low test reliability or low intrapersonal cognitive stability. We explore the role of family environments and socio-economic status in explaining higher or lower transmission rates.
    [Draft Available Upon Request]

Publications

  1. Bohr, Clement E., Charles A. Holt, and Alexandra V. Schubert. "Assisted Savings for Retirement: An Experimental Analysis." European Economic Review 119 (2019): 42-54.
    [Abstract]
    This paper evaluates the benefit of a basic retirement savings program. It considers a life-cycle experiment with interest paid on a safe asset and returns on a risky asset that induce a stationary fundamental value. The private savings treatment provides an income stream that terminates at retirement. Observed consumption starts too high and finishes low in later periods. The assisted savings treatment smooths income over all periods, which dampens asset price bubbles and improves consumption profiles. This improvement persists in treatments done without asset trading, but disappears with sharply reduced interest rates that simplify present value considerations.
    [Paper]

Work in Progress

  • "Measuring Children's Economic Preferences in Kenya" (with Claudia De Goyeneche, Gonzalo Ferres, Edward Miguel, and Michael Walker).
  • "Break the Norm: Signaling and Optimal Break-Taking at Work" (with Katja Michlbauer and Raphaël Raux)
  • "Menopause in Kenya" (with Edward Miguel and Michael Walker)
  • "Perceptions of Cognitive Decline in Kenya" (with Edward Miguel and Michael Walker)
  • "Pain, Pain, Go Away? Chronic Pain and Economic Decision-Making in Uganda"