Who Belongs? The Determinants of Selective Membership into the National Bureau of Economic Research

By Marieke Kleemans and Rebecca L. Thornton

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We examine the determinants of membership into the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) using data from all tenured and tenure-track economists at R1 universities in the United States. We construct an annual panel of employment, research productivi...

Promoting Female Interest in Economics: Limits to Nudges

By Todd Pugatch and Elizabeth Schroeder

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We assess whether light-touch interventions can increase the proportion of women who study economics. Over 2,000 students were randomly assigned to receive a message with basic information about the economics major, the basic message combined with an emph...

Can Positive Feedback Encourage Female and Minority Undergraduates into Economics?

By Kelly Bedard, Jacqueline Dodd, and Shelly Lundberg

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

In a field experiment designed to encourage undergraduate women and underrepresented minority students to study economics, we send personalized letters to students completing introductory economics classes inviting them to an informational meeting. A rand...

Info.Econ: Increasing Diversity among Economics Majors

By Andrea Chambers, Stacy Dickert-Conlin, Carey Elder, Steven J. Haider, and Scott Imberman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We analyze an intervention that provided information from diverse voices about breadth, opportunities, and grade distributions in economics. In 2020, the year of a global pandemic, randomized control trials delivered videos/infographics and letters to stu...

Why the Middle East is Economically Underdeveloped: Historical Mechanisms of Institutional Stagnation

[Symposium: Middle East]

By Timur Kuran

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2004

Although a millennium ago the Middle East was not an economic laggard, by the 18th century it exhibited clear signs of economic backwardness. The reason for this transformation is that certain components of the region's legal infrastructure stagnated as t...

Women in Academic Economics: Have We Made Progress?

By Donna K. Ginther and Shulamit Kahn

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

This study uses data from Academic Analytics to examine gender differences in promotion to associate professor in economics. We found that women in economics were 15 percent less likely to be promoted to associate professor after controlling for cumulativ...

Changes in the US Gender Gap in Wages in the 1960s

By Martha J. Bailey, Thomas Helgerman, and Bryan A. Stuart

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

The 1960s witnessed landmark legislation that aimed to increase women's wages, including the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, and the 1966 amendments to the Fair Labor Standards Act. Although the gender gap in pay changed little a...

Work-Care Balance over the Day and the Gender Wage Gap

By German Cubas, Chinhui Juhn, and Pedro Silos

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We focus on the timing of labor supplied during the day and its interaction with home care responsibilities. Using the American Time Use Survey, we measure the incidence of household care activities between 8 AM and 5 PM (the prime time of the day). Women...

Do Male and Female Students Use Networks Differently?

By Yana Gallen and Melanie Wasserman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Gender differences in professional networks have been shown to contribute to men and women's disparate labor market outcomes. This gap could be due to differences in network access, differences in network usage, or both. Using novel administrative data fr...

Disparities in Health Care and Medical Evaluations by Gender: A Review of Evidence and Mechanisms

By Marika Cabral and Marcus Dillender

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Male and female patients often receive different medical evaluations and treatment even when they have the same symptoms, and relative to men, women are less likely to receive benefits within social insurance programs that rely on medical evaluations. Thi...

COVID-19 Disruptions Disproportionately Affect Female Academics

By Tatyana Deryugina, Olga Shurchkov, and Jenna Stearns

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

The rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent countermeasures disrupted economic activity around the world. We investigate the effects of COVID-19 disruptions on the gender gap in academia. We administer a global survey of academics to collect ...

Up the Political Ladder: Gender Parity in the Effects of Electoral Defeats

By Melanie Wasserman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

This paper investigates whether an electoral defeat has different effects on the subsequent political involvement of male and female candidates for state office. Using US state legislative election returns from 1972 to 2010 and a regression discontinuity ...

Information, Confidence, and the Gender Gap in Bargaining

By Barbara Biasi and Heather Sarsons

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We test whether the observed difference in the propensity to negotiate between men and women can be explained by gender differences in information about other people's negotiating experiences and outcomes and by confidence in one's abilities and in talkin...

The Family Origin of the Math Gender Gap Is a White Affluent Phenomenon

By Gaia Dossi, David Figlio, Paola Giuliano, and Paola Sapienza

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Previous research has shown that norms around the role of women in society could help explain the gender gap in mathematics and that these norms could be transmitted within the family. Using data from the Florida Department of Education combined with birt...

Can Women Teach Math (and Be Promoted)? A Meta-analysis of Gender Differences across Student Evaluations of Teaching

By Amanda J. Felkey and Cassondra Batz-Barbarich

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Academic women in economics have different experiences and outcomes than men and women in other social science fields do, including bias within their performance evaluation instruments, student teaching evaluations (STEs). Despite research citing biases i...

Development, Growth and Policy Reform in the Middle East and North Africa since 1950

[Symposium: Middle East]

By Tarik M. Yousef

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2004

The September 11 terrorist attacks ignited global interest in the Middle East. Observers in the region and abroad were quick to highlight the development "deficits" in Middle Eastern countries which have been linked to everything from structural economic ...

Gender Bias in Assessments of Teacher Performance

By Sabrin Beg, Anne Fitzpatrick, and Adrienne M. Lucas

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

To measure whether principals exhibit gender bias when assessing teacher effectiveness, we compare principals' subjective evaluations against teachers' self-evaluations and objective effectiveness in Ghanaian primary schools. Female and male teachers rate...

Civil Rights Enforcement and the Racial Wage Gap

By Jamein P. Cunningham and Jose Joaquin Lopez

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We present new evidence on three measures of civil rights enforcement—litigation, judge dismissal, and plaintiff win rates—across US district courts from 1979 to 2016. Across courts, higher shares of Republican judges are associated with higher dismis...

A Model of Occupational Licensing and Statistical Discrimination

By Peter Q. Blair and Bobby W. Chung

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We develop a model of statistical discrimination in occupational licensing with endogenous occupation selection and wage determination. We find a unique equilibrium with sharp comparative statics. Our key theoretical result is that the licensing premium i...

Intergenerational Economic Mobility and the Racial Wealth Gap

By Jermaine Toney and Cassandra L. Robertson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

A growing body of research documents the importance of wealth and the racial wealth gap in perpetuating inequality across generations. We examine the impact of wealth on child income. Our two-stage least squares regressions reveal that grandparental wealt...