We provide direct evidence on explicit and implicit biases against women among students in economics relative to other fields. We conducted a large scale survey among undergraduates in Chile, among both entering first-year students and students in years 2 and above, combining a wide battery of measures to create an index of gender bias. Economics students are more biased than students in other fields. There is some evidence that economics students are more biased already upon entry, before exposure to economics classes. The gap becomes more pronounced among students in years 2 and above, especially for male students.

Abstract We present new findings about the relationship between marriage and socioeconomic background in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Imputing socioeconomic status of family of origin from first names, we document a socioeconomic gradient for women in the probability of marriage and the socioeconomic status of husbands, which widens over this period. Regional divergence in occupational structure explains half of the divergence in the probability of marriage, and most of the increase in marital sorting. Urbanization and the associated improvement in women's labor market opportunities drive most of these differences.

This paper uses data from nine tennis Grand Slam tournaments played between 2005 and 2007 to assess whether men and women respond differently to competitive pressure in a setting with large monetary rewards. In particular, it asks whether the quality of the game deteriorates as the stakes become higher. The paper conducts two parallel analyses, one based on aggregate set-level data, and one based on detailed point-by-point data, which is available for a selected subsample of matches in four of the nine tournaments under examination. The set-level analysis indicates that both men and women perform less well in the final and decisive set of the match. This result is robust to controls for the length of the match and to the inclusion of match and player-specific fixed effects. The drop in performance of women in the decisive set is slightly larger than that of men, but the difference is not statistically significant at conventional levels. On the other hand, the detailed point-by-point analysis reveals that, relative to men, women are substantially more likely to make unforced errors at crucial junctures of the match. Data on serve speed, on first serve percentages and on rally length suggest that women play a more conservative and less aggressive strategy as points become more important. I present a simple game-theoretic model that shows that a less aggressive strategy may be a player's best response to an increase in the intrinsic probability of making unforced errors.

We present new findings about the relationship between marriage and socioeconomic background in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.Imputing socioeconomic status of family of origin from first names, we document a socioeconomic gradient for women in the probability of marriage and the socioeconomic status of husbands.This socioeconomic gradient becomes steeper over time.We investigate the degree to which it can be explained by occupational income divergence across geographic regions.Regional divergence explains about one half of the socioeconomic divergence in the probability of marriage, and almost all of the increase in marital sorting.Differences in urbanization rates and the share of foreign-born across states drive most of these differences, while other factors (the scholarization rate, the sex ratio and the share in manufacturing) play a smaller role.

In, “So You Want to Go to Graduate School? Factors that Influence Admissions to Economics PhD Programs,” Jones et al. (2020) provide a welcome and useful analysis of the factors that graduate admis...

This paper studies how politicians and voters respond to new information on the threats of climate change. Using data on the universe of federal disaster declarations between 1989 and 2014, we document that congress members from districts hit by a hurricane are more likely to support bills promoting more environmental regulation and control in the year after the disaster. The response to hurricanes does not seem to be driven by logrolling behavior or lobbysts' pressure. The change in legislative agenda is persistent over time, and it is associated with an electoral penalty in the following elections. The response is mainly promoted by representatives in safe districts, those with more experience, and those with strong pro-environment records. Our evidence thus reveals that natural disasters may trigger a permanent change in politicians' beliefs, but only those with a sufficient electoral strength or with strong ideologies are willing to engage in promoting policies with short-run costs and long-run benefits.

By comparing siblings attending the same school at different points of time, we estimate the effects of schoolmates’ average parental education on lifetime earnings and other medium and long-term outcomes and investigate whether these effects vary with individual parental education. We find that exposure to privileged peers increases lifetime earnings and the probability of completing tertiary education. These effects are mainly concentrated among “disadvantaged” students. Lifetime earnings increase also with the dispersion of peers’ average parental education. These results suggest that school desegregation policies can produce long-term benefits. The size of the estimated effects, however, is small.

This paper studies whether, how and why elected politicians and voters respond to new information on the threats of climate change. Using data on the universe of federal disaster declarations between 1989 and 2014, we document that Congress members from districts hit by a hurricane are more likely to support bills promoting more environmental regulation and control in the year after the disaster. This response to hurricanes does not seem to be driven by logrolling behavior or lobbysts’ pressure, and it is associated with an electoral penalty in the following elections. The change in legislative agenda is persistent over time, prompted by the direct experience of the hurricane’s damages, and mainly promoted by representatives in safe districts and those with strong pro-environment records. Our evidence thus reveals that natural disasters may trigger a permanent change in politicians’ beliefs, but only politicians with a sufficient electoral credit or with strong ideologies are willing to engage in promoting policies with short-run costs and long-run benefits.

This paper constructs a continuous and consistent measure of intergenerational mobility in the United States between 1850 and 1930 by linking individuals with the same first name across pairs of decennial Censuses. One of the advantages of this methodology is that it allows to calculate intergenerational correlations not only between fathers and sons, but also between fathers-in-law and sons-in-law, something that is typically not possible with historical data. Thus, the paper sheds light on the role of marriage in the intergenerational transmis- sion of economic status from a historical perspective. We find that the father-son correlation in economic status grows throughout the period, but is consistently lower than the correlation between fathers-in-law and sons-in-law. The gap declines over time, and seems to have closed by the end of the period. We present a simple model of investment in human capital, marital sorting and intergenerational mobility that can rationalize the ?ndings.

This paper estimates intergenerational elasticities across three generations in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, exploring how maternal and paternal grandfathers predict the economic status of their grandsons and granddaughters. We document that the relationship between the income of grandparents and grandchildren differs by gender. The socio-economic status of grandsons is more strongly associated with the status of paternal grandfathers than maternal grandfathers. The status of maternal grandfathers is more strongly correlated with the status of granddaughters than grandsons, while the opposite is true for paternal grandfathers. We argue that the findings can be rationalized by a model of gender-specific intergenerational transmission of traits and imperfect assortative mating.

In many textbooks, the decision to invest in human capital is presented in terms of the present discounted value of the lifetime stream of costs and benefits associated with the investment. I argue that this approach, while delivering some useful insights, also conflates subjective discount rates and market interest rates, obfuscates the role of credit market imperfections, and makes difficult the analysis of policy interventions and the effects of external shocks on human capital investment. I show instead how a simple two-period model can deliver the main insights about investment in human capital and is flexible enough to be used to model a wide variety of policy interventions.

This paper uses data on bill cosponsorship in the U.S. House of Representatives to estimate gender differences in cooperative behaviour. We find that among Democrats there is no significant gender gap in the number of cosponsors recruited, but women-sponsored bills tend to have fewer cosponsors from the opposite party. On the other hand, we find robust evidence that Republican women recruit more cosponsors and attract more bipartisan support on the bills that they sponsor. We interpret these results as evidence that cooperation is mostly driven by a commonality of interest, rather than gender per se.

In the past, concerns about inequality were tempered by the perception that people had a high degree of economic mobility. But how has intergenerational mobility changed in the US? In new research which uses census data on names and occupational income to examine social mobility between 1850 and 1940, Claudia Olivetti and Daniele Paserman find that intergenerational mobility was high in the 19th Century, then fell sharply between 1900 and 1920, and began to improve somewhat after that. They argue that these changes in economic mobility were influenced by regional differences in economic development and fluctuations in income and wealth inequality

This paper estimates historical intergenerational elasticities between fathers and children of both sexes in the United States using a novel empirical strategy. The key insight of our approach is that the information about socioeconomic status conveyed by first names can be used to create pseudo-links across generations. We find that both father-son and father-daughter elasticities were flat during the nineteenth century, increased sharply between 1900 and 1920, and declined slightly thereafter. We discuss the role of regional disparities in economic development, trends in inequality and returns to human capital, and the marriage market in explaining these patterns. (JEL D63, J12, J16, J24, J62, N31, N32)

In this paper we use a large linked employer-employee data set on German establishments between 1993 and 2012 to investigate how the gender composition of the top layer of management affects a variety of establishment and worker outcomes. We use two different measures to identify the gender composition of the top layer based on direct survey data: the fraction of women among top managers, and the fraction of women among working proprietors. We document the following facts: (a) There is a strong negative association between the fraction of women in the top layer of management and several establishment outcomes, among them business volume, investment, total wage bill per worker, total employment, and turnover; (b) Establishments with a high fraction of women in the top layer of management are more likely to implement female-friendly policies, such as providing childcare facilities or promoting and mentoring female junior staff; (c) The fraction of women in the top layer of management is also negatively associated with employment and wages, both male and female, full-time and part-time. However, all of these associations vanish when we include establishment fixed effects and establishment-specific time trends. This reveals a substantial sorting of female managers across establishments: small and less productive establishments that invest less, pay their employees lower wages, but are more female-friendly are more likely to be led by women.

In this paper we use a large linked employer-employee data set on German establishments between 1993 and 2012 to investigate how the gender composition of the top layer of management affects a variety of establishment and worker outcomes. We use two different measures to identify the gender composition of the top layer based on direct survey data: the fraction of women among top managers, and the fraction of women among working proprietors. We document the following facts: (a) There is a strong negative association between the fraction of women in the top layer of management and several establishment outcomes, among them business volume, investment, total wage bill per worker, total employment, and turnover; (b) Establishments with a high fraction of women in the top layer of management are more likely to implement female-friendly policies, such as providing childcare facilities or promoting and mentoring female junior staff; (c) The fraction of women in the top layer of management is also negatively associated with employment and wages, both male and female, full-time and part-time. However, all of these associations vanish when we include establishment fixed effects and establishment-specific time trends. This reveals a substantial sorting of female managers across establishments: small and less productive establishments that invest less, pay their employees lower wages, but are more female-friendly are more likely to be led by women.

This paper estimates intergenerational elasticities across three generations in the United States in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries. We extend the methodology in Olivetti and Paserman (2013) to explore four dierent channels of intergenerational mobility: fatherssons-grandsons, fathers-sons-granddaughters, fathers-daughters-grandsons and fathers-daughtersgranddaughters. We document three main ndings. First, there is evidence of a strong second-order autoregressive coecient for the process of intergenerational transmission of income. Second, the socio-economic status of grandsons is inuenced more strongly by paternal grandfathers than by maternal grandfathers. Third, maternal grandfathers are more important for granddaughters than for grandsons, while the opposite is true for paternal grandfathers. We propose two alternative theoretical frameworks that can rationalize these ndings.

In this paper we use a large linked employer-employee data set on German firms between 1993 and 2011 to investigate how the gender composition of the top layer of management, and its interaction with the gender composition of the second layer of management, affects a variety of firm and worker outcomes. We use three different measures to identify the gender composition of the top two layers of management: two based on direct survey data, and one based on the firm’s salary structure. We document the following facts: a) There is a strong negative association between the fraction of women in the top layer of management and several firm outcomes, among them business volume, investment and wage bill per worker, and total employment; most of these associations vanish when we include firm fixed effects and specific time trends, except for business volume and wage bill per worker; b) The fraction of women in the top layer of management is also negatively associated with both female and male employment and wages, both full-time and part-time; with the only exception of male part-time wages, all these associations are robust to the inclusion of firm fixed effects and specific time trends; c) Interestingly, the above relationships are heterogeneous in the gender composition of the second layer of management. Women in the top layer who are surrounded entirely by men reduce business volume per worker and raise employment and wages of both men and women, but these effects are reverted as the share of women in the second layer increases. Results are consistent with a simple model of employee-based taste discrimination in which male subordinates are resistant to women in leadership positions.

During the second part of the 1990s, the Israeli economy experienced a surge in labor productivity and total factor productivity, which was driven primarily by the manufacturing sector. This surge in productivity coincided with the full absorption and integration into the workforce of highly skilled immigrants from the former Soviet Union. The Soviet immigrants were disproportionately employed in manufacturing and, after an initial adjustment period, progressively moved into higher responsibility occupations where their skills could be put to use more efficiently. This has led some observers to comment that the high-skilled immigration wave was one of the main determinants for the fast growth of the Israeli economy in the 1990s. In this paper, I use a unique data set on Israeli manufacturing firms and investigate directly whether firms and industries with a higher concentration of immigrants experienced increases in productivity. The analysis shows that there is no correlation between immigrant concentration and productivity at the firm level in cross-sectional and pooled OLS regressions. First-differences estimates, which control for fixed unobserved differences between firms, reveal, if anything, a negative correlation between the change in output per worker and the change in the immigrant share. A more in-depth analysis reveals that the immigrant share was strongly negatively correlated with output and productivity in low-tech industries. In high-technology industries, the results tend to point to a positive relationship, hinting at complementarities between technology and the skilled immigrant workforce.

This paper provides a new perspective on intergenerational mobility in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We devise an empirical strategy that allows to calculate intergenerational elasticities between fathers and children of both sexes. The key insight of our approach is that the information about socioeconomic status conveyed by first names can be used to create a pseudo-link not only between fathers and sons, but also between fathers and daughters. The latter is typically not possible with historical data. We find that the father-son elasticity in economic status grows throughout the sample period. Intergenerational elasticities for daughters follow a broadly similar trend, but with some differences in timing. We argue that most of the increase in the intergenerational elasticity estimate in the early part of the 20th Century can be accounted for by the vast regional disparities in economic development, with increasing returns to human capital contributing to explain the residual. Other mechanisms such as changes in fertility, migration, and investment in public schooling, appear to have had only a minor role in explaining the trends.