The Ethics of Incentivizing the Uninformed: A Vignette Study

By Sandro Ambuehl and Axel Ockenfels

American Economic Review, May 2017

Our recent working paper (Ambuehl, Ockenfels, and Stewart 2017) shows theoretically and experimentally that people with higher costs of information processing respond more to an increase in the incentive for a complex transaction, and decide to participat...

Sacred versus Pseudo-sacred Values: How People Cope with Taboo Trade-Offs

By Philip E. Tetlock, Barbara A. Mellers, and J. Peter Scoblic

American Economic Review, May 2017

Psychologists have documented widespread public deference to "sacred values" that communities, formally or informally, exempt from tradeoffs with secular limits, like money. This work has, however, been largely confined to low-stakes settings. As the stak...

Quantifying the Disincentive Effects of Joint Taxation on Married Women's Labor Supply

By Alexander Bick and Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln

American Economic Review, May 2017

We quantify the disincentive effects of elements of joint taxation in the labor income tax codes of 17 European countries and the US. We analyze the extent to which hours worked of married men and women would change if each country switched to a system of...

Cross-Country Evidence on the Relationship between Overwork and Skilled Women's Job Choices

By Patricia Cortes and Jessica Pan

American Economic Review, May 2017

This paper examines the relationship between the prevalence of overwork and skilled women's labor force participation and occupational choice. Using country-level variation, we find a negative relationship between the share of males working 50+ hours a we...

The Expanding Gender Earnings Gap: Evidence from the LEHD-2000 Census

By Claudia Goldin, Sari Pekkala Kerr, Claudia Olivetti, and Erling Barth

American Economic Review, May 2017

The gender earnings gap is an expanding statistic over the lifecycle. We use the LEHD Census 2000 to understand the roles of industry, occupation, and establishment 14 years after leaving school. The gap for college graduates 26 to 39 years old expands by...

A Gender Agenda: A Progress Report on Competitiveness

By Muriel Niederle

American Economic Review, May 2017

I review the role of a new behavioral trait, competitiveness, on the gender agenda. I first describe how to measure competitiveness in the laboratory and show that gender differences in competitiveness are robust. I then establish the external economic re...

Trumping Norms: Lab Evidence on Aggressive Communication before and after the 2016 US Presidential Election

By Jennie Huang and Corinne Low

American Economic Review, May 2017

This paper provides evidence from a negotiation experiment that the 2016 US presidential election of Donald Trump had a profound impact on individual behavior in the lab. Using a Battle of the Sexes game with unstructured communication, we find that post-...

Gender, Competitiveness, and Study Choices in High School: Evidence from Switzerland

By Thomas Buser, Noemi Peter, and Stefan C. Wolter

American Economic Review, May 2017

Willingness to compete has been found to predict individual and gender differences in educational choices and labor market outcomes. We provide further evidence for this relationship by linking Swiss students' Baccalaureate school (high school) specializa...

Gender Differences in the Allocation of Low-Promotability Tasks: The Role of Backlash

By Linda Babcock, Maria P. Recalde, and Lise Vesterlund

American Economic Review, May 2017

This paper examines whether backlash exacerbates gender differences in time spent on low-promotability tasks. We ask whether gender differences found in previous research--women receiving more requests than men to do these tasks and women being more likel...

No Gender Difference in Willingness to Compete When Competing against Self

By Coren L. Apicella, Elif E. Demiral, and Johanna Mollerstrom

American Economic Review, May 2017

We report on two experiments investigating whether there is a gender difference in the willingness to compete against oneself (self-competition), similar to what is found when competing against others (other-competition). In one laboratory and one online ...

Recognition for Group Work: Gender Differences in Academia

By Heather Sarsons

American Economic Review, May 2017

How is credit for group work allocated when individual contributions are not observed? I use data on academics' publication records to test whether demographic traits like gender influence how credit is allocated under such uncertainty. While solo-authore...

Shopping While Female: Who Pays Higher Prices and Why?

By Anne Fitzpatrick

American Economic Review, May 2017

I estimate gender price discrimination in the Ugandan antimalarial drug market with an audit study. To determine whether results are consistent with statistical or taste-based discrimination, I contrast gender results with results by ethnicity (tribe). Ve...

Women's Inheritance Rights, Household Allocation, and Gender Bias

By Nayana Bose and Shreyasee Das

American Economic Review, May 2017

We analyze the impact of improved land inheritance rights for women in India on female empowerment by examining their educational attainment and the intergenerational effects of the reform. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that the amen...

Assortative Matching under Asymmetric Information: Evidence from Malawi

By Manuela Angelucci and Daniel Bennett

American Economic Review, May 2017

Asymmetric information is a key feature of the marriage market. In HIV-endemic settings, HIV risk is an important partner attribute that may influence marriage timing and partner selection. We use a sample of married women in rural Malawi to validate a mo...

The Role of Marriage in Fighting HIV: A Quantitative Illustration for Malawi

By Jeremy Greenwood, Philipp Kircher, Cezar Santos, and Michèle Tertilt

American Economic Review, May 2017

How might policies that promote marriage and/or dissuade divorce help in the fight against HIV/AIDS? This question is addressed employing a choice-theoretic general equilibrium search model, using Malawi as a case study. In the framework developed, indivi...

Tying the Double-Knot: The Role of Assets in Marriage Commitment

By Jeanne Lafortune and Corinne Low

American Economic Review, May 2017

What explains the growing gap in marriage rates between socioeconomic groups? We present a robust stylized fact not previously documented: marriage rates are higher for individuals with more assets. We argue this may be driven by marriage and cohabitation...

Is Modern Technology Responsible for Jobless Recoveries?

By Georg Graetz and Guy Michaels

American Economic Review, May 2017

Since the early 1990s, recoveries from recessions in the US have been plagued by weak employment growth. We investigate whether a similar problem afflicts other developed economies, and whether technology is a culprit. We study recoveries from 71 recessio...

Secular Stagnation? The Effect of Aging on Economic Growth in the Age of Automation

By Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo

American Economic Review, May 2017

Several recent theories emphasize the negative effects of an aging population on economic growth, either because of the lower labor force participation and productivity of older workers or because aging will create an excess of savings over desired invest...

Concentrating on the Fall of the Labor Share

By David Autor, David Dorn, Lawrence F. Katz, Christina Patterson, and John Van Reenen

American Economic Review, May 2017

The recent fall of labor's share of GDP in numerous countries is well-documented, but its causes are poorly understood. We sketch a "superstar firm" model where industries are increasingly characterized by "winner take most" competition, leading a small n...

Pandora's Auctions: Dynamic Matching with Unknown Preferences

By Daniel Fershtman and Alessandro Pavan

American Economic Review, May 2017

Matching theory typically assumes that agents know their values for possible partners and confines attention to settings in which matching is either static, or driven by population dynamics. In many environments of interest, instead, dynamics originate in...