About Me

I am a PhD candidate at the University of Exeter. Starting in September 2025, I will spend a year at the Aix-Marseille School of Economics (AMSE) as a recipient of their 4th-year fellowship.

My research interests lie in Political Economy and Behavioural Economics. In my research I use (natural) experiments and text-as-data.

I will be on the 2025-26 job market.

You can contact me at: J.Lamb3@exeter.ac.uk

Job Market Paper

  • Strategy of the Commons: Causal Evidence from a Lottery in Parliament– with Connor Powell
    Abstract: How do politicians secure top government positions? We exploit a natural experiment in the UK House of Commons, where politicians enter a lottery to win the opportunity to introduce legislation of their choosing. First, we verify that winning this lottery improves career outcomes, leading to a 65% (12 percentage point) increase in ministerial appointments five years after treatment. Next, we introduce a model of political capital that yields predictions about the legislation proposed by politicians. To verify predictions from our model, we use Natural Language Processing techniques to analyse the content of the bills presented by ballot winners. We provide evidence that politicians who strategically use this opportunity to push party objectives see a larger boost to their careers.

Working Papers

Abstract: We explore reapplication gaps to leadership positions and to research assistantships caused by applicants’ gender and confidence, respectively. Providing applicants with information that helps them update their beliefs of the likelihood of receiving an offer closes both gaps, suggesting that confidence-boosting messages not only make underconfident but also female applicants more willing to reapply. A mediation analysis corroborates the role of confidence: when (truthfully) informed that they were among the top 20% of applicants and possessed characteristics desired by the employer, beliefs about relative performance and relative fit mediated the treatment’s impact on expected likelihood of success and willingness to reapply. Our findings are compatible with a simple model of Bayesian updating, with one exception: in the field experiment, men’s likelihood of reapplying decreased when informed of their high relative standing. The paper discusses the importance of employer feedback boosting employee confidence towards closing gender gaps in the labor market.

Abstract: In 1998, The Lancet published an article that erroneously linked the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism. A media scare questioning the safety of the MMR vaccine followed. To analyze the effects of exposure to different reporting during this scare, we exploit exogenous variation in newspaper readership caused by the boycott of The Sun (England’s most widely read newspaper) in Liverpool. Using difference-in-differences and synthetic methods, we find that MMR vaccination rates fell 20% less in Liverpool compared to similar health authorities after the media scare. To analyze the reporting of newspapers around the time of the scare, we train word-embedding models on a corpus of newspaper articles. When compared to the most widely read newspaper in Liverpool after the boycott, The Sun’s reporting was more likely to drive fears about the vaccine, even when fraud surrounding the original Lancet paper became a major news story. In line with the natural language processing analysis, the differences in vaccination rates are largest for cohorts of children due to be vaccinated just after major events in the MMR scandal.

Works in Progress

  • Environmental Beliefs and Effort Between Generations – with H. Fornwagner and O. Hauser
  • Stereotypes and Effort Provision in Teams – with A. McCrea and R. Tariq
  • Giving More Together – with B. Grodeck and O. Hauser