Amen Jalal

(My name is pronounced Aey-mun Ja-laal)

Photo of Amen Jalal

Photo by Surbhi Bharadwaj

Hello! I am a 5th year PhD student in economics at the London School of Economics. I have a Bachelors in economics from Yale University. Before starting the PhD, I worked at the World Bank as a research assistant in the DIME and ID4D teams.

My research interests are in development, labor, gender and environmental economics.

Works in progress

Screening Women Out? Experimenting with Salary Disclosure in Job Ads (Job Market Paper)

Outstanding Paper Award at the Discrimination and Diversity Workshop, 2025.

Supported by G2LMLIC. AEA registry here.

Click for abstract Salaries vary across firms for similar jobs, and women systematically sort into lower-paying firms. This may reflect women's preferences for the non-wage amenities available at such firms, or a lack of information about the wages they forego. This paper examines whether the absence of salary information in job ads restricts women's access to high-paying firms. I find that large, high-paying firms are more likely to obscure salaries during job search, and less likely to offer flexible work arrangements. Meanwhile, women, like men, apply more to higher paying jobs when salaries are visible, but, unlike men, avoid high-paying jobs when salaries are not disclosed. To investigate these patterns, I conduct a field experiment on Pakistan's leading job search platform, involving around 20,000 jobs and 8,900 firms. Treated jobs are mandated to disclose salary ranges, while control jobs retain the option to hide. The intervention has limited effects on posted salaries but increases applications by 49%, especially to large firms whose higher pay is newly revealed. The reallocation of search from small to large firms is 43 percentage points larger for women, closing the gender gap in sorting induced by salary non-disclosure. That women redirect search to large firms when salaries are revealed – even though these firms offer fewer of the amenities women prefer – suggests that gendered sorting may arise not from differences in wage preferences, but from differential costs of information frictions.


Coping with Catastrophe: Pakistan’s 2022 Floods (with Pol Simpson)

Two annual follow-up surveys completed. Supported by the IGC, STEG and Harvard University. IGC Blog Post.

Click for abstract Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent due to climate change, yet we know little about how unprecedented climate shocks impact the most vulnerable populations. In this project, we investigate the effects of the 2022 floods in Pakistan, which affected 33 million households and left one third of the country under water. Using a pre-flood census, we draw a random sample of 5,100 low-income, rural households across 6 districts of Sindh, whom we track and survey one and two years after the floods. These households vary in their local exposure to the 2022 floods. We study (i) the impact of the floods on these households, (ii) how they cope with these impacts and make forward-looking adaptations, and (iii) how flood impacts evolve over time. We exploit plausibly random local variation in flood water inundation – i.e., precipitation interacted with topography – conditional on historical rain and flood risk. Our outcomes include flood damages (e.g. loss of income or assets, health impacts, and disruption of social networks and trade), coping strategies (e.g. drawdown of savings, sale of assets, new loans, increased labour supply, changes to educational or nuturitional investments) and adaptation (e.g. diversification of networks or assets, and migration).


The Illusion of Time: Gender Gaps in Job Search and Employment (with Oriana Bandiera and Nina Roussille)

Draft available soon. Supported by Gates Foundation, STICERD (LSE), and RISF (LSE). AEA registry here.

Click for abstract In countries with low female labor force participation, women often transition directly from education to homemaking. Whether this reflects a deliberate, forward-looking choice or is the result of unanticipated constraints has important implications for women themselves and the policies designed to support them. This paper investigates when and why women exit the education-to-employment pipeline using data from Pakistan, where two-thirds of college-educated women remain out of the labor force. We track 2,400 students from two major universities, documenting their labor market aspirations before graduation, and following their job search and employment outcomes over the subsequent year. Men and women begin with the same work aspirations, apply at the same time and rate, and receive comparable numbers of job offers, but women are more likely to turn down offers. We design a randomized intervention that modestly incentivizes early applications. The treatment raises employment among women by over 20\% but has no effect on men. Gains are concentrated among women who underestimated the immediacy of marriage market pressures. Employment rises despite the absence of job search or marriage penalties, implying misperceived constraints rather than binding trade-offs. Policy interventions that help mitigate the labor market distortions associated with these misperceptions can close a sizable share of the gender gap.


Can Competition Reduce Corruption? (with Muhammad Haseeb, Kate Vyborny and Alex Quispe)

Draft available soon. Supported by the World Bank’s ID4D and the Gates Foundation.

Click for abstract Corruption remains a major obstacle to the delivery of public services in developing countries. We study whether competition between service delivery agents can mitigate corruption, leveraging exogenous changes to the market structure of agents responsible for delivering government cash transfers in Pakistan. A reform that increased the market power of these agents led to a 29.1 pp increase in the probability that a beneficiary had to pay an involuntary bribe to access the cash transfer. However, in areas with 1 standard deviation higher competition, this increase in bribe payments is almost completely eliminated. We rule out that mechanisms other than competition drive these results, such as strategic entry, changes in market access, and differences in monitoring efforts or cash recipient characteristics.


What Happens When Cash Transfers Suddenly Stop? (with Nasir Iqbal, Mahreen Mahmud, Kate Vyborny)

Draft available soon. Supported by IFPRI and IPA.

Click for abstract Female-targeted cash transfers are frequently used by governments as a policy tool to enhance women's empowerment. A large body of evidence has demonstrated positive impacts on women's empowerment. However, a household may not continue to receive cash transfer payments indefinitely; they may be terminated due to budget cuts, program changes, or recipient graduation. Do the documented gains to women's empowerment erode once transfers are discontinued? Using a regression discontinuity-in-differences approach around a revised eligibility threshold, we study the consequences for households of exiting Pakistan’s largest cash transfer program. We find no reduction in a range of measures of women's empowerment one year after program exit.


Policy writing

Using Biometrics to Deliver Cash Payments to Women: Early Results from an Impact Evaluation in Pakistan. World Bank 2022.

Collecting Accurate Data on Intimate Partner Violence. World Bank 2025.

Teaching