Published Papers:
"Gender gaps and the structure of local labor markets", with Barbara Petrongolo
Labour Economics 64, 2020
In this paper we discuss some strands of the recent literature on the evolution of gender gaps and their driving forces. We will revisit key stylized facts about gender gaps in employment and wages in a few high-income countries. We then discuss and build on one gender-neutral force behind the rise in female employment, namely the rise of the service economy. This is also related to the polarization of female employment and to the geographic distribution of jobs, which is expected to be especially relevant for female employment prospects. We finally turn to currently debated causes of remaining gender gaps and discuss existing evidence on labor market consequences of women’s heavier caring responsibilities in the household. In particular, we highlight sharp gender differences in commuting behavior and discuss how women’s stronger distaste for commuting time may feed into gender pay gaps.
Working Papers:
"Daddy's girl: Daughters, managerial decisions, and gender inequality", with Nina Smith
[R&R Review of Economic Studies]
Coverage: Marginal Revolution, The Visible Hand Podcast (Job Market Edition), medium.com
Abstract: Managers are in a unique position to hinder or advance gender equality in firms. Using Danish registry data, we study the role of managers' gender attitudes in shaping gender inequality in the workplace by exploiting the birth of a daughter as opposed to a son as a plausibly exogeneous shock to male managers’ gender attitudes. Comparing within-firm changes in women’s labor outcomes depending on the manager’s newborn gender, we find that women’s relative earnings and employment increase by 4.4\% and 2.9\% respectively following the birth of the manager’s first daughter. These effects are driven by an increase in managers’ propensity to replace male workers by hiring women with comparable education, hours worked, and earnings. In line with managers’ ability to substitute men with comparable women, we do not detect any significant effect on firm performance. Finally, our findings suggest that the daughter effect does not result from changes in managers' private incentives, but rather from a rapid and persistent shift in their perception of the social cost associated with gender inequality.
"Female Representation and Talent Allocation in Entrepreneurship: The Role of Early Exposure to Entrepreneurs", with Mikkel Baggesgaard Mertz and Viola Salvestrini
Winner of the best paper award at the CSEF-RCFS Conference on Finance, Labor, and Inequality 2022
Winner of the UniCredit best paper award on Gender Economics 2022
Abstract: This paper shows that exposure to entrepreneurs during adolescence increases women's entry and performance in entrepreneurship and improves the allocation of talent in the economy. Using population-wide registry data from Denmark, we track nearly one million individuals from adolescence to adulthood and exploit idiosyncratic within-school, cross-cohort variation in exposure to entrepreneurs, as measured by the share of an adolescent's peers whose parents are entreprneeurs at the end of compulsory school. Early exposure, and in particular exposure to the entrepreneur parents of female peers, encourages girls' entry and tenure into this profession, while it has no effect on boys. The increase in female entrepreneurship is associated with the creation of succesful and female-friendly firms. Furthermore, early exposure reduces women's probability to discontinue education at the end of compulsory school and to hold low wage jobs through their lives. Together, these results challenge the view that the most succesful female entrepreneurs would enter this profession regrdless of early exposure.
"Hiring Difficulties and Firms' Growth", with Thomas Le Barbanchon and Julien Sauvagnat
Coverage: KelloggInsight
Abstract: This paper studies the effect of hiring difficulties on firms' outcomes. We use a shift-share identification strategy combining occupation-specific changes in the difficulty of filling job vacancies within a local labor market (the \textit{shifts}) and variation across firms in their pre-sampled occupation mix (the \textit{shares}). We show that hiring difficulties have negative effects on firms' employment, capital, sales, and profits. Firms partially adjust to hiring difficulties by increasing wages and the retention rate of incumbent workers, and by lowering their hiring standards. We then document larger effects of hiring difficulties for labor-intensive firms, firms in expanding sectors, and for non-routine cognitive, high-skill, high-wage, and specialized occupations. Taken together, our findings indicate that hiring difficulties are an important determinant of the growth and profitability of firms across time and space.
"Mind the cap: The effects of regulating bankers' pay", with Jordy Meekes (new draft coming soon)
Abstract: This paper investigates how external restrictions to the possibility of paying large bonuses affect firms’ remuneration schemes and their ability to attract and retain workers. To answer this question, we study the effects of the Dutch bonus cap policy, which set a 20% limit to the ratio between variable and fixed pay for all workers employed in the banking industry in the Netherlands. Using social-security data covering the population of firms and workers, we employ a dynamic difference-in-difference approach that compares banks to other financial institutions not covered by the regulation. We find that treated employees experience a sharp drop in variable pay, which is partly compensated by an increase in their fixed pay. As a result of the observed changes in compensation, we find evidence of small negative effects on banks’ ability to attract and retain workers
"Gender diversity and decision-making in teams", with Viola Salvestrini (draft available upon request)
This project has been awarded the 2021 EIEF Grant and the IHS Research Grant in January 2024
Abstract: We investigate how gender composition of teams affects the decision-making process and the quality of decisions, using a novel database on the universe of collegial rulings from a sample of first- and second-instance criminal courts in Italy. Leveraging the quasi-random allocation of both judges and cases to judicial teams, we document three main findings. First, all-women teams have higher conviction rates than both mixed-gender and all-men teams. Second, all-men teams converge faster to a decision than any other team composition. Third, decisions made by all-men teams are more likely to be incorrect, as indicated by a higher likelihood of being appealed and subsequently overturned, whereas no significant difference in decision quality is observed between mixed-gender and all-women teams. To explain these results, we propose a model of diagnostic skills in which individuals differ in both preferences and ability. The observed relationship between conviction and overturn rates, together with the analysis of written judicial opinions, supports the conclusion that variations in effort and skills, rather than preferences, drive our results.
Selected Work in Progress:
"Workplace masculinity and women's careers", with Cécile Bonneau, Louis-Pierre Lepage, Heather Sarsons, Mikko Silliman
"Knowledge flows within firms", with Dita Eckardt, Louis-Pierre Lepage, Giulia Vattuone
"Gender gaps and the structure of local labor markets", with Barbara Petrongolo
Labour Economics 64, 2020
In this paper we discuss some strands of the recent literature on the evolution of gender gaps and their driving forces. We will revisit key stylized facts about gender gaps in employment and wages in a few high-income countries. We then discuss and build on one gender-neutral force behind the rise in female employment, namely the rise of the service economy. This is also related to the polarization of female employment and to the geographic distribution of jobs, which is expected to be especially relevant for female employment prospects. We finally turn to currently debated causes of remaining gender gaps and discuss existing evidence on labor market consequences of women’s heavier caring responsibilities in the household. In particular, we highlight sharp gender differences in commuting behavior and discuss how women’s stronger distaste for commuting time may feed into gender pay gaps.
Working Papers:
"Daddy's girl: Daughters, managerial decisions, and gender inequality", with Nina Smith
[R&R Review of Economic Studies]
Coverage: Marginal Revolution, The Visible Hand Podcast (Job Market Edition), medium.com
Abstract: Managers are in a unique position to hinder or advance gender equality in firms. Using Danish registry data, we study the role of managers' gender attitudes in shaping gender inequality in the workplace by exploiting the birth of a daughter as opposed to a son as a plausibly exogeneous shock to male managers’ gender attitudes. Comparing within-firm changes in women’s labor outcomes depending on the manager’s newborn gender, we find that women’s relative earnings and employment increase by 4.4\% and 2.9\% respectively following the birth of the manager’s first daughter. These effects are driven by an increase in managers’ propensity to replace male workers by hiring women with comparable education, hours worked, and earnings. In line with managers’ ability to substitute men with comparable women, we do not detect any significant effect on firm performance. Finally, our findings suggest that the daughter effect does not result from changes in managers' private incentives, but rather from a rapid and persistent shift in their perception of the social cost associated with gender inequality.
"Female Representation and Talent Allocation in Entrepreneurship: The Role of Early Exposure to Entrepreneurs", with Mikkel Baggesgaard Mertz and Viola Salvestrini
Winner of the best paper award at the CSEF-RCFS Conference on Finance, Labor, and Inequality 2022
Winner of the UniCredit best paper award on Gender Economics 2022
Abstract: This paper shows that exposure to entrepreneurs during adolescence increases women's entry and performance in entrepreneurship and improves the allocation of talent in the economy. Using population-wide registry data from Denmark, we track nearly one million individuals from adolescence to adulthood and exploit idiosyncratic within-school, cross-cohort variation in exposure to entrepreneurs, as measured by the share of an adolescent's peers whose parents are entreprneeurs at the end of compulsory school. Early exposure, and in particular exposure to the entrepreneur parents of female peers, encourages girls' entry and tenure into this profession, while it has no effect on boys. The increase in female entrepreneurship is associated with the creation of succesful and female-friendly firms. Furthermore, early exposure reduces women's probability to discontinue education at the end of compulsory school and to hold low wage jobs through their lives. Together, these results challenge the view that the most succesful female entrepreneurs would enter this profession regrdless of early exposure.
"Hiring Difficulties and Firms' Growth", with Thomas Le Barbanchon and Julien Sauvagnat
Coverage: KelloggInsight
Abstract: This paper studies the effect of hiring difficulties on firms' outcomes. We use a shift-share identification strategy combining occupation-specific changes in the difficulty of filling job vacancies within a local labor market (the \textit{shifts}) and variation across firms in their pre-sampled occupation mix (the \textit{shares}). We show that hiring difficulties have negative effects on firms' employment, capital, sales, and profits. Firms partially adjust to hiring difficulties by increasing wages and the retention rate of incumbent workers, and by lowering their hiring standards. We then document larger effects of hiring difficulties for labor-intensive firms, firms in expanding sectors, and for non-routine cognitive, high-skill, high-wage, and specialized occupations. Taken together, our findings indicate that hiring difficulties are an important determinant of the growth and profitability of firms across time and space.
"Mind the cap: The effects of regulating bankers' pay", with Jordy Meekes (new draft coming soon)
Abstract: This paper investigates how external restrictions to the possibility of paying large bonuses affect firms’ remuneration schemes and their ability to attract and retain workers. To answer this question, we study the effects of the Dutch bonus cap policy, which set a 20% limit to the ratio between variable and fixed pay for all workers employed in the banking industry in the Netherlands. Using social-security data covering the population of firms and workers, we employ a dynamic difference-in-difference approach that compares banks to other financial institutions not covered by the regulation. We find that treated employees experience a sharp drop in variable pay, which is partly compensated by an increase in their fixed pay. As a result of the observed changes in compensation, we find evidence of small negative effects on banks’ ability to attract and retain workers
"Gender diversity and decision-making in teams", with Viola Salvestrini (draft available upon request)
This project has been awarded the 2021 EIEF Grant and the IHS Research Grant in January 2024
Abstract: We investigate how gender composition of teams affects the decision-making process and the quality of decisions, using a novel database on the universe of collegial rulings from a sample of first- and second-instance criminal courts in Italy. Leveraging the quasi-random allocation of both judges and cases to judicial teams, we document three main findings. First, all-women teams have higher conviction rates than both mixed-gender and all-men teams. Second, all-men teams converge faster to a decision than any other team composition. Third, decisions made by all-men teams are more likely to be incorrect, as indicated by a higher likelihood of being appealed and subsequently overturned, whereas no significant difference in decision quality is observed between mixed-gender and all-women teams. To explain these results, we propose a model of diagnostic skills in which individuals differ in both preferences and ability. The observed relationship between conviction and overturn rates, together with the analysis of written judicial opinions, supports the conclusion that variations in effort and skills, rather than preferences, drive our results.
Selected Work in Progress:
"Workplace masculinity and women's careers", with Cécile Bonneau, Louis-Pierre Lepage, Heather Sarsons, Mikko Silliman
"Knowledge flows within firms", with Dita Eckardt, Louis-Pierre Lepage, Giulia Vattuone
