Can Mentoring Help Female Assistant Professors in Economics? An Evaluation by Randomized Trial

By Donna K. Ginther, Janet M. Currie, Francine D. Blau, and Rachel T. A. Croson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Women continue to be underrepresented in academic ranks in the economics profession. The Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession of the American Economic Association established the CeMENT mentoring workshop to support women in resear...

Employment and Earnings for Federal Government Economists: Empirical Evidence by Gender and Race

By Lucia Foster, Julia Manzella, Erika McEntarfer, and Danielle H. Sandler

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We contribute to the literature on diversity in the economics profession, which has mostly focused on academia, by providing a first look at the employment and earnings of federal government economists by gender and race. Combining micro-level data on fed...

Do Workers Comply with Salary History Bans? A Survey on Voluntary Disclosure, Adverse Selection, and Unraveling

By Amanda Agan, Bo Cowgill, and Laura Katherine Gee

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Salary history bans forbid employers from asking job candidates to disclose their salaries. However, applicants can still volunteer this information. Our theoretical model predicts that the effect of these laws varies by how workers comply. Our survey of ...

What Happens after an Abortion Denial? A Review of Results from the Turnaway Study

By Sarah Miller, Laura R. Wherry, and Diana Greene Foster

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We provide a brief overview of the Turnaway Study, the first study to collect longitudinal data on individual women who received versus were denied a wanted abortion in the United States. The study team collected data on nearly 1,000 women seeking an abor...

Legal Access to Reproductive Control Technology, Women's Education, and Earnings Approaching Retirement

By Jason M. Lindo, Mayra Pineda-Torres, David Pritchard, and Hedieh Tajali

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

What do historical changes in legal access to reproductive health care technology tell us about the long-run effects of such changes? We investigate this question using data from the Health and Retirement Study and an identification strategy leveraging va...

Local Economic Conditions and Fertility from the Great Depression through the Great Recession

By Jessamyn Schaller, Price Fishback, and Kelli Marquardt

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

This paper reexamines the association between local economic conditions and fertility using a new dataset of county-level birthrates and per capita income in the United States spanning the period 1937–2016. Using a panel data model, we estimate that gro...

Awards and the Gender Gap in Knowledge Contributions in STEM

By Jana Gallus and Emma Heikensten

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Organizations miss out if their smartest members do not bring their ideas to the table. Gallus and Heikensten (2019) establish that gender differences play an important role for female participation in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and ma...

Gender Differences in Scientific Communication and Their Impact on Grant Funding Decisions

By Julian Kolev, Yuly Fuentes-Medel, and Fiona Murray

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Why are women underrepresented in the fields of science, technology, and innovation? Using a sample of Gates and NIH grant applications submitted by a common pool of US-based academic researchers, we implement a range of text analysis methods associated w...

Inventor Gender and the Direction of Invention

By Rembrand Koning, Sampsa Samila, and John-Paul Ferguson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We study whether increasing the share of female inventors leads to more biomedical inventions that focus on the needs of women. After accounting for detailed disease-technology, disease-year, and technology-year fixed effects, we find that a 10 percentage...

Preventing the Spread of Antibiotic Resistance

By Jérôme Adda

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

This paper studies the spread of antibiotic resistance and its determinants, relying on unique data at state, year, bacteria, and drug level, covering all US states. I relate antibiotic resistance to the use of antibiotics in human prescription and animal...

Community-Based Crisis Response: Evidence from Sierra Leone's Ebola Outbreak

By Darin Christensen, Oeindrila Dube, Johannes Haushofer, Bilal Siddiqi, and Maarten Voors

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Postmortems on the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa suggest that effective community engagement helped slow transmission by encouraging people to come forward and be tested. We evaluate the impact of Community Care Centers: a new crisis response model...

The Economics of Viral Outbreaks

By Imran Rasul

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

The frequency and complexity of viral outbreaks is increasing over time. The economic costs of outbreaks are severe; this is not only because of increased morbidity and mortality but also because viral outbreaks—representing aggregate health shocks—ca...

Advance Market Commitments: Insights from Theory and Experience

By Michael Kremer, Jonathan Levin, and Christopher M. Snyder

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Ten years ago, donors committed $1.5 billion to a pilot Advance Market Commitment (AMC) to help purchase pneumococcal vaccine for low-income countries. The AMC aimed to encourage the development of such vaccines, ensure distribution to children in low-inc...

Administration above Administrators: The Changing Technology of Health Care Management

By Abe Dunn, Joshua D. Gottlieb, and Adam Hale Shapiro

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

This paper measures the costs and types of administrative inputs in health care. We use data on labor and nonlabor inputs by industry and categorize them as administrative or not. We find that nonlabor inputs are a critical part of administrative spending...

Provider Discretion and Variation in Resource Allocation: The Case of Triage Decisions

By David C. Chan and Jonathan Gruber

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

One of the most challenging environments in health care is the emergency department (ED) A key decision-maker in that context is triage nurses, who assess patient illness severity and influence wait times for medical attention. We gather novel data on the...

Time Dependency in Physician Decision-Making

By Lawrence Jin, Rui Tang, Han Ye, Junjian Yi, and Songfa Zhong

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Using data on more than 250,000 emergency department (ED) visits, we study the time-of-day effect on physician decision-making and patient outcomes. After controlling for patient characteristics, physician fixed effects, and work hours, we find that cases...

A Test of Enhancing Learning in Economics through Nudges

By Rita Balaban and Patrick Conway

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We test for the importance of nudges in improving student performance in introductory economics courses at UNC-Chapel Hill. We use a randomized controlled trial to test the effectiveness of nudges in encouraging use of academic supports and (jointly) the ...

Diagnosing the Learning Environment for Diverse Students in Introductory Economics: An Analysis of Relevance, Belonging, and Growth Mindsets

By Amanda Bayer, Syon P. Bhanot, Erin T. Bronchetti, and Stephen A. O'Connell

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Using administrative and survey data, we diagnose the learning environment in an introductory economics course. Relative to men from overrepresented groups, women and underrepresented minority students finish the course reporting significantly lower measu...

A Pareto-Improving Way to Teach Principles of Economics: Evidence from the University of Toronto

By Dwayne Benjamin, Avi J. Cohen, and Gillian Hamilton

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

University of Toronto undergraduates can choose between conventional and literacy-targeted (LT) principles of economics courses. We compare demographics and performance in subsequent courses for 13,000 students over 11 years and find that LT courses attra...

How Often Does Active Learning Actually Occur? Perception versus Reality

By Brandon J. Sheridan and Ben Smith

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Substantial evidence suggests active learning pedagogies are superior to lecturing, but little evidence exists on the prevalence of such methods. Watts and Schaur (2011) find, based on self-reported data, the median instructor lectures 83 percent of the t...