Session 1: Gender

We document that female breadwinners do more home production than their male partners, even when restricting to “housework” like cooking and cleaning instead of childcare. By comparing to gay male and female couples, we highlight that specialization within heterosexual households does not appear to be “gender neutral” even after accounting for average earnings differences. This could be explained by either a large comparative advantage by women or some gendered inefficiency in the division of home production within the house-hold. Using a model, we show that if either of these two elements are present, unions involving women who out-earn their male partners will produce lower surplus, because the time allocated to home production will be more expensive. This provides a micro-founded reason for substantial literature showing that lower relative earning by men decreases marriage rates. We test that our mechanism—allocation of housework, rather than norms about earnings—plays a role by exploiting variation in the ratio of home production time in US immigrants’ countries of origin, and find that the link between relative earning and marriage rates is indeed tied to home production allocation.

While there is a vast (and mixed) literature on gender differences in social preferences, little is known about believed gender differences in social preferences. Using data from 15 studies and 8,979 individuals, we find that women are believed to be more generous and more equality-oriented than men. This believed gender gap is robust across a wide range of contexts that vary in terms of strategic considerations, selfish motives, fairness concepts, and payoffs. Yet, this believed gender gap is largely inaccurate. Consistent with models of associative memory, and specifically the role of similarity and interference, the believed gender gap is correlated with recalled prior life experiences from similar contexts and significantly affected by an experience that may interfere with the recall process of prior memories even though this interfering experience should not affect the beliefs of perfect-memory Bayesians. Application studies further reveal that believed gender differences extend to the household (i.e., beliefs about contributions to the home, family, and upbringing of children), the workplace (i.e., beliefs about equal pay) and policy views (i.e., beliefs about redistribution, equal access to education, healthcare, and affordable housing).

Early fertility is thought to be one of the key barriers to female human capital attainment in sub-Saharan Africa, yet contraceptive take-up remains puzzlingly low, even among highly-educated populations with healthcare access. We study a barrier to hormonal and long-acting contraceptive uptake that has not yet been examined in the economic literature: the persistent (incorrect) belief that these contraceptives may cause later infertility. This belief creates a perceived tradeoff between current and future reproductive control. We use a randomized controlled trial with female undergraduates at the flagship university in Zambia – a highly-skilled population where education is likely to have particularly high returns – to test two potential interventions to increase contraceptive use. Despite high rates of sexual activity and low rates of condom-use, only 5% of this population uses hormonal contraceptives at baseline. Providing a non-coercive conditional cash transfer to visit a local clinic temporarily increases contraceptive use. However, pairing this transfer with information addressing fears that contraceptives cause infertility persistently increases take-up over 6 months. The latter treatment moves beliefs about the infertility effects of contraceptives and leads to the take-up of longer-lasting contraceptives like injections. Compliers are more likely to cite fear of infertility as the reason for not using contraceptives at baseline. IV estimates indicate that eliminating the belief that contraceptives cause infertility would triple contraceptive use.

This paper studies the causal effect of denying women a wanted abortion using linked administrative microdata. Colombian women facing barriers to abortion services can file a claim (tutela) to protect their abortion rights. We find that women requesting to terminate unwanted pregnancies disproportionately come from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. We leverage the random assignment of claims to judges and find that female judges are 20 p.p. (32%) less likely to deny abortion than male judges. Using IV, we find that denying abortion causes enduring harm to women and their families, affecting their childbearing, mortality, health, education, economic well-being, and welfare reliance.

This paper documents a large gap between college-graduating women’s intended and realized labor force participation, and proposes an explanation. To do so, we field a panel survey and an experiment on >1,500 college students in Pakistan. A month before graduation, women believe they have about the same likelihood of working six months later as their male peers (~75%). By contrast, we uncover large employment gaps: only 37.9% of women were employed six months later, compared to 64.4% of men. Traditional supply-side (e.g. GPA, major, job preferences, search effort) and demand-side factors (e.g. interviews, wage and job offers) leave this gap virtually unchanged. However, we find that women’s employment is much more sensitive to the timing of their applications than men’s.  We provide a theoretical framework and empirical evidence on why timing matters: the unexpected increase in women's reservation wages over time. To causally estimate the effect of timing, we experimentally shift students' job applications closer to graduation. We find that this treatment increases women's employment by 22.3% (7.5 ppt) six months later, and has no effect on men. Finally, we explore behavioral and cultural mechanisms through which the treatment operates.

The “child penalty” significantly reduces women’s lifetime earnings and pension savings, but it remains unclear whether these gaps are the deliberate result of forward-looking decisions. This paper provides novel evidence on the role of cognitive constraints in mothers’ labor supply decisions. In a large-scale field experiment that combines rich survey and administrative data, we provide mothers with objective, individualized information about the long-run costs of reduced labor supply. The treatment increases demand for financial information and future labor supply plans, in particular among women who underestimated the long-term costs. Leveraging linked employer administrative data one year post-intervention, we observe that these mothers increase their actual labor supply by 6 percent over the mean.

Women’s economic outcomes changed dramatically over the last century, but there is scarce evidence on the role of workplace technological advances in fueling these changes. This paper studies the effects of the adoption of the typewriter into US work-places on women’s economic outcomes in the 20th century. Exploiting variation in the demand for typists across industries coupled with the geographic distribution of industries, I document that the adoption of the typewriter caused an increase in women’s labor force participation and a decrease in their likelihood of being married and having children. I show that the mechanisms driving these developments operated through two main channels: there was a direct effect driving White women to leave the household and enter offices, and an indirect crowding-in effect that increased the participation of Black women, who substituted for White women by entering domestic service work. The typewriter also resulted in upward mobility for women through the channel of marriage. Using linked data following women over time, I show that typists were more likely to marry men of higher socioeconomic status compared to women working in alternative white-collar occupations. This result holds in a within-household analysis comparing sisters. This finding is consistent with a hypothesis that typing and secretarial occupations offered women a unique opportunity to work in offices alongside higher earning men.

We study the evolution of female representation in editorial roles for the most important journals in economics from 1960 to 2019. We first document that the share of women in editorial roles has steadily increased over the past six decades. Second, we investigate whether this increase is due to an expansion of the pool of qualified female economists, or due to a change in the preference for appointing women. We find evidence for both using a large database on detailed CVs of more than 37,000 economists. Finally, to understand whether there are gender gaps in the probability of being offered and/or of accepting editorial positions, we administer a large-scale survey among most prominent scholars in economics. We find evidence for the first channel: women are more likely to be offered editorial positions at top-5 and general interest journals, but there are no gender differences in the propensity to accept these offers.

This study examines the impact of military bases on Colombian communities from 1999 to 2016, focusing on women and reproductive outcomes. Using a novel dataset compiled from approximately 11,000 newspaper articles and legal documents, we employ a difference-in-difference approach to address the strategic placement of bases. Preliminary findings indicate an increase in conceptions among women aged 10 to 14 in areas with bases, and an increase in grade failure and dropout among female students for corresponding grades. This research contributes to understanding military-civilian interactions in conflict zones, particularly, the overlooked effects on women.

I study an affirmative action policy aimed at improving gender balance within college fields. The policy boosts the application scores of individuals whose gender is underrepresented in the program they apply to. Since the admission design is strategy-proof, these extra points should only affect the probability of admission conditional on applying, not college applications themselves. Using a novel dataset covering all college applications in Norway, however, I find that candidates of the underrepresented gender are much more likely to apply when they receive the boost. When programs introduce (end) the policy, they receive about 15 percent more (fewer) applicants of the underrepresented gender. This response exists along the entire distribution of application scores, including among individuals who would have been admitted absent affirmative action had they just applied. I subsequently estimate how the policy affects academic and labor market outcomes of those shifted in versus those shifted out of their preferred program by the policy under different assumptions about application behavior.

In this paper, we find that the benefits of a low-cost early-life health intervention transfer from one generation to the next. Importantly, we show that there are only significant education and income spillovers if the mothers were exposed. We provide novel evidence that improved marriage outcomes of mothers, but not fathers, are an important source of the estimated intergenerational spillovers. Moreover, we document that the early-life healthcare policy significantly increased intergenerational mobility across three generations making it a key candidate to contribute to reducing cycles of poverty.

Menopause is a major biological shock to women, marking the end of their reproductive years. Despite its relevance, scant research has studied how menopause impacts social dynamics, labor market outcomes, or health care demand. Using high-quality linked national register administrative data from Norway and Sweden, combined with a stacked difference-in-differences design, we estimate the effect of menopause diagnosis on employment and earnings, reliance on social safety net programs, and demand for medical care. We find that menopause affects a broad swath of women’s lives, ranging from a temporary increase in visits to doctors, to a persistent decline in full-time employment and earnings, and an increased receipt of social transfers. Our results suggest that policies aimed at supporting women who suffer more serious symptoms around the menopausal transition may have wide-ranging benefits.

While many romantic relationships begin at work, intimate relationships between managers and subordinates have increasingly come under scrutiny. We use administrative data covering the universe of cohabiting couples in Finland over two decades to explore the career implications of dating and breaking up with a manager and spillovers on the wider work-force. Using a difference-in-differences across-couples research design we find that those in relationships with managers in their workplaces experience a 6% increase in their earnings compared to those in relationships with managers in different workplaces. However, when a manager and subordinate break up, the subordinate is 13 percentage points more likely to drop out of employment. Last, we examine the spillovers of these relationships on the broader workforce. We document a 6 percentage point decrease in retention of other workers from these relationships, with larger effects for smaller establishments and establishments where the subordinate had larger earnings gains. We conclude that these relationships impose negative externalities on colleagues, including but not limited to exit from the firm.

Family-owned firms are the backbone of economic activity, but their continuity is threatened by fewer generational transmissions, especially in the context of declining fertility. Overall, family CEOs seem to exhibit gender preferences favoring their sons for succession, thereby limiting the talent pool within the family. Using Finnish administrative data on family firms linked to population register data on shareholders, their children, and their extended family, we trace the steps leading to these often gender imbalanced succession decisions. We start by examining fertility patterns and find evidence of son preference among entrepreneurial families: families with first born daughters are larger than those with first born sons. Next, we examine the human capital accumulation process of the children of entrepreneurs: strong same-gender human capital transmission patterns are mediated by the female employment share in the industry of the entrepreneur parent. Thus daughters have a higher chance of being groomed for succession if the family firm operates in a female-dominated industry. Families with fertility stopping rules that indicate son preference display distinct human capital accumulation and succession patterns favoring sons. Turning to firm outcomes, we find no evidence that children of exiting CEOs who take control of the firm hurt its performance, relative to the results of professional CEOs. In fact, offspring transitions can bolster firm prospects for smaller sized firms. These results suggest that a path for family-owned firms to achieve successful intergenerational transitions might be to encourage more daughters to take them over.

Equal pay laws increasingly require that workers doing “similar” work are paid equal wages within firm. We study such “equal pay for similar work” (EPSW) policies theoretically and test our model’s predictions empirically using evidence from a 2009 Chilean EPSW. When EPSW only binds across protected class (e.g., no woman can be paid less than any similar man, and vice versa), firms segregate their workforce by gender. When there are more men than women in a labor market, EPSW increases the gender wage gap. By contrast, EPSW that is not based on protected class can decrease the gender wage gap.

This paper studies the interplay between major returns, preferences, and market design in explaining the gender earnings gap. Information on preferences allows us to estimate the major impacts while accounting for selection on rich sources of preference heterogeneity. We use this to estimate pecuniary and non-pecuniary returns to majors. We find substantial heterogeneity in earnings and fertility impacts, with sizable gender differences in each. We find that pecuniary returns are most predictive of male gender choices and the opposite is true for females, providing evidence about an important pre-labor market choice that causes a rift in the educational decisions of men and women. The interaction of gender, major choice, earnings, and fertility are captured by the substantial heterogeneity in child penalty gaps across fields of study, ranging from no short-run penalty to as high as 43%. Motivated by the fact that preferences are hard to change and that most of the gap is due to differences in representation, we fix preferences and consider policy-relevant counterfactuals leveraging the transparent rules embedded in a centralized assignment system. Our results suggest that slight gender-specific quotas can substantially reduce the gender earning gap among college graduates with essentially no impact on aggregate efficiency.

This paper shows that decision-makers make more stereotypical decisions when they struggle to recall individual-level information, penalizing women in male-dominated fields. Analyzing administrative data from Italian public schools, I find that when teachers need to assess a larger number of students, girls are less likely to be recommended for top-tier scientific high school tracks compared to boys with the same math standardized scores. Notably, this bias vanishes for teachers who report checking student data in class registers, relying less on memory alone. To directly assess the extent to which limitations and biases in recall generate more stereotypical decisions, I conducted two experiments. In the first, teachers provided track recommendations for a series of student profiles. When teachers cannot check individual data and must rely on memory, they recall a limited set of individual signals and disproportionately retrieve stereotype-consistent information. As a consequence, large gender-based disparities in track recommendations emerge, with girls 39% less likely to be recommended to STEM tracks than identical boys. Eliminating memory constraints by allowing teachers to check individual-level information reduces the gender gap by 80%, mitigating the misallocation of talent. A second large-scale online experiment generalizes this mechanism. Taken together, the results highlight how memory limitations and biases amplify discriminatory behaviors and suggest that simple, cost-effective interventions facilitating access to individual-level information can mitigate such biases.

In this study, we examine how the same hiring opportunity leads to different labor market outcomes for male and female full-time workers. By utilizing matched employer-employee data from Germany, our empirical approach leverages 30,000 unforeseen worker deaths spanning from 1980 to 2016 which enables us to explore how firms react to exogenous vacancies. In a first exercise, we propose a novel measure of the gender wage gap by comparing the wages of deceased workers and their replacements across four transition groups: male-male, male-female, female-male, and female-female. Using the respective transition gap of groups without a change in gender as a counterfactual, we estimate the resulting gender wage gap to be about 15 to 20 log points. Furthermore, we use machine learning to compare workers who are hired into similar positions, and find that, regardless of the departed worker’s gender, female replacement workers are offered (or negotiate) positions with average starting wages that are 20 log points lower than their male counterparts. Even after considering the pre-hire wage of replacement workers at their previous firm, half of this gap persists. The wage gap does not close over the subsequent years. The gender disparity in opportunities cannot be attributed to redistribution of wages paid among other coworkers.

This paper examines contracts that allow marrying couples in Italy to choose, at virtually no cost, how their assets will be divided in case of divorce. The majority of newlyweds (67% in 2011) choose to forgo the default regime, in which assets are split equally between husband and wife, and to maintain separate property, in which each divorcee gets to keep the assets in his or her name. Using administrative data on the universe of marriages, divorces and separations between 1995 and 2011, we show that households in which the wife undertakes substantial household-specific investments are more likely to be in a community property regime. To interpret this fact, we develop a dynamic model of marriage, female labor supply, savings, and divorce in which wives may forgo labor market experience to care for the children. Community property, which limits the set of property allocations available to households, provides insurance to these wives upon divorce if couples do not cooperate on assets allocation before the marriage ends. The estimates suggest that, as the rate of female labor participation increases and the gender wage gap decreases, there are increasing gains from separate property. Hence, lower costs of prenuptial contracting, as observed in Italy and other civil law countries, can lead to substantial welfare gains for both spouses, higher rates of female labor force participation, lower probability of divorce and higher saving rates.