Causes and Consequences of Group Disparities
Paper Session
Sunday, Jan. 5, 2025 10:15 AM - 12:15 PM (PST)
- Chair: Christopher Walters, University of California-Berkeley
Effect of Childbirth on Intra-Household Bargaining, Resource Allocations, and Women’s Welfare: Revisit Child Penalty from a Household Perspective
Abstract
This paper investigates the impact of childbirth on wives' bargaining power and welfare by examining labor market responses and adjustments in intra-household resource allocations. Using data from the Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers (1993-2019) and employing an event study approach, we find that wives, compared to their husbands, experience a 34.89% decrease in private consumption and a 7.48% decrease in leisure following the first birth. We then develop a collective bargaining framework to estimate the effects of parenthood on bargaining power, preferences for consumption and leisure, and productivity in producing public goods for both wives and husbands. Our estimation reveals that the wife's bargaining power declines by 34.30% after childbirth, while the preferences for public goods for both spouses increase. Consequently, the arrival of a child leads to a 12.16% decline in welfare for wives but a 6.97% increase for husbands. In our counterfactual analysis, we find that if a wife's bargaining power remains unaffected by fertility or wage effects, her welfare would increase by 2.60 percentage points compared to the baseline. Furthermore, if no wage penalties were imposed on wives, her welfare would increase by 7.78 percentage points.School Competition, Classroom Formation, and Academic Quality
Abstract
Racial segregation is an enduring feature of U.S. K-12 education. Up to half of it originates within schools due to how classrooms are formed. This paper develops an empirical framework to understand the implications of discretionary classroom formation in competitive education markets. I leverage a school competition reform to document via an event-study that in anticipation of a competitive shock, public schools both raise their academic quality and change students’ assignments to classrooms such that classroom segregation increases. I then estimate an empirical model of school choice and competition to understand whether schools choose their level of classroom segregation so as to differentiate horizontally, thereby relaxing vertical competition on costly academic quality. The model's novelty is that it embeds classroom segregation both on the demand side, as a dimension that parents have preferences over, and on the supply side, as a margin of differentiation that schools choose directly alongside academic quality. I estimate preferences for classroom segregation so as to rationalize the reduced-form effects of competition identified through the event-study. I use the model to evaluate a policy that requires schools to form racially integrated classrooms, given the composition of the student body at the school. I find that the policy raises aggregate academic quality and the average test score in equilibrium. Magnitude-wise, present value lifetime earnings rise by up to $1,620 per student. Since the schools that increase academic quality the most are located in non-white areas, learning gains accrue mostly to non-white students, decreasing the racial test score gap by 2%.Are Patent Examiners Gender Neutral?
Abstract
This paper studies the prevalence and evolution of gender bias in the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) examination process and assesses the consequences of this bias on economic outcomes. Applying Natural Language Processing tools to patent applications submitted between 2001 and 2013, I estimate gender gaps conditional on the content of the patent application, comparing allowance probabilities between teams of inventors with different gender compositions but similar inventions. Despite a substantial raw gender gap in the probability of initial allowance, I document that there is no average difference in initial allowance rates between mixed-gender and all-male teams. This average masks important heterogeneity. Allowance rates for mixed-gender teams were significantly lower between 2001 and 2003, a gap that shrank to zero by 2005. Gender gaps also vary substantially across examiners, with bias against mixed-gender patents concentrated among senior examiners and bias in favor of women concentrated among young examiners. A mean zero gender gap with positive variance generates economic loss due to the misallocation of granting rights. Building on the methodology of Kogan et al. (2017), I estimate that these biases depressed the value of approved patents by $12.6 million per year.Discussant(s)
Kirill Borusyak
,
University of California-Berkeley
Arthur Lewbel
,
Boston College
Robert Ainsworth
,
University of Florida
Raviv Murciano-Goroff
,
Boston University
JEL Classifications
- J7 - Labor Discrimination