The Math Gender Gap: The Role of Culture

By Natalia Nollenberger, Núria Rodríguez-Planas, and Almudena Sevilla

American Economic Review, May 2016

This paper investigates the effect of gender-related culture on the math gender gap by analysing math test scores of second-generation immigrants, who are all exposed to a common set of host country laws and institutions. We find that immigrant girls whos...

Does the Market Value CEO Styles?

By Antoinette Schoar and Luo Zuo

American Economic Review, May 2016

We study how investors perceive the skill set that different types of CEOs bring into their companies. We compare CEOs who started their careers during a recession with other CEOs. We show that the announcement return around the appointment of a recession...

Gender Diversity on Corporate Boards: Do Women Contribute Unique Skills?

By Daehyun Kim and Laura T. Starks

American Economic Review, May 2016

We show that gender diversity in corporate boards could improve firm value because of the contributions that women make to the board. Prior studies examine valuation effects of gender-diverse boards and reach mixed conclusions. To help resolve this conund...

Playing the Boys Game: Golf Buddies and Board Diversity

By Sumit Agarwal, Wenlan Qian, David M. Reeb, and Tien Foo Sing

American Economic Review, May 2016

We study the participation of women in golf, a predominately male social activity, and its influence on their likelihood of serving on a board of directors. Exploiting a novel dataset of all golfers in Singapore, we find that woman golfers enjoy a 54% hig...

Women on Boards in Finance and STEM Industries

By Renée B. Adams and Tom Kirchmaier

American Economic Review, May 2016

We document that women are less represented on corporate boards in Finance and more traditional STEM industry sectors. Even after controlling for differences in firm and country characteristics, average diversity in these sectors is 24% lower than the mea...

Childhood Environment and Gender Gaps in Adulthood

By Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Frina Lin, Jeremy Majerovitz, and Benjamin Scuderi

American Economic Review, May 2016

We show that differences in childhood environments shape gender gaps in adulthood by documenting three facts using population tax records for children born in the 1980s. First, gender gaps in employment rates, earnings, and college attendance vary substan...

School Quality and the Gender Gap in Educational Achievement

By David Autor, David Figlio, Krzysztof Karbownik, Jeffrey Roth, and Melanie Wasserman

American Economic Review, May 2016

Recent evidence indicates that boys and girls are differently affected by the quantity and quality of family inputs received in childhood. We assess whether this is also true for schooling inputs. Using matched Florida birth and school administrative reco...

What Explains the Gender Gap in College Track Dropout? Experimental and Administrative Evidence

By Ingvild Almås, Alexander W. Cappelen, Kjell G. Salvanes, Erik Ø. Sørensen, and Bertil Tungodden

American Economic Review, May 2016

We exploit a unique data set, combining rich experimental data with high-quality administrative data, to study dropout from the college track in Norway, and why boys are more likely to drop out. The paper provides three main findings. First, we show that ...

Experimental Age Discrimination Evidence and the Heckman Critique

By David Neumark, Ian Burn, and Patrick Button

American Economic Review, May 2016

We design and implement a large-scale field experiment on age discrimination to address limitations of past research that may bias their results. One limitation is the practice of giving older and younger applicants similar experience in the job to which ...

The Power of Eye Tracking in Economics Experiments

By Joanna N. Lahey and Douglas Oxley

American Economic Review, May 2016

Eye tracking is a technology that tracks eye activity including how long and where a participant is looking. As eye tracking technology has improved and become more affordable its use has expanded. We discuss how to design, implement, and analyze an exper...

Determinants of Callbacks to Job Applications: An Audit Study

By Henry S. Farber, Dan Silverman, and Till von Wachter

American Economic Review, May 2016

We summarize findings from an audit study investigating how unemployment duration, age, and holding a low-level "interim" job affect the likelihood that experienced college-educated females applying for administrative support jobs receive a callback from ...

Supply and Demand for Discrimination: Strategic Revelation of Own Characteristics in a Trust Game

By Anthony Heyes and John A. List

American Economic Review, May 2016

In strategic settings a player may be able to influence the behavior of an opponent by revealing information about their own characteristics. They may for example aim to exploit stereotypes held by others. We provide an experimental test of this. A substa...

Student Loan Information Provision and Academic Choices

By Maximilian Schmeiser, Christiana Stoddard, and Carly Urban

American Economic Review, May 2016

We examine the effect of a student loan information intervention on changes in college major using administrative data from the Montana University System from 2002-2014. Our difference-in-difference-in-differences strategy exploits the relative trends for...

Birth Timing and Neonatal Health

By Cristina Borra, Libertad González, and Almudena Sevilla

American Economic Review, May 2016

We take advantage of a new natural experiment to evaluate the health effects of scheduling birth early for non-medical reasons on infant health. In 2010, the cancellation of a generous child benefit in Spain led may families to schedule birth early in ord...

STEM Training and Early Career Outcomes of Female and Male Graduate Students: Evidence from UMETRICS Data Linked to the 2010 Census

By Catherine Buffington, Benjamin Cerf, Christina Jones, and Bruce A. Weinberg

American Economic Review, May 2016

Women are underrepresented in science and engineering, with the underrepresentation increasing in career stage. We analyze gender differences at critical junctures in the STEM pathway--graduate training and the early career--using UMETRICS administrative ...

Medicare Part D and Portfolio Choice

By Padmaja Ayyagari and Daifeng He

American Economic Review, May 2016

Economic theory suggests that medical spending risk affects the extent to which households are willing to accept financial risk, and consequently their investment portfolios. In this study, we focus on the elderly for whom medical spending represents a su...

Coordinated Admissions Program

By Rodney J. Andrews

American Economic Review, May 2016

In the wake of challenges to affirmative action, access to oversubscribed elite public universities remains a contentious issue. Much of the research on these issues focuses on freshman admissions. This paper examines the University of Texas at Austin's C...

Can Admissions Percent Plans Lead to Better Collegiate Fit for Minority Students?

By Kalena E. Cortes and Jane Arnold Lincove

American Economic Review, May 2016

Why do so many students mismatch when choosing a college? A plausible hypothesis is a lack of information about the likelihood of admission. This study contributes to the literature on mismatch by testing whether public university automatic admissions pol...

Religious Workers' Density and the Racial Earnings Gap

By Fernando Lozano and Jessica Shiwen Cheng

American Economic Review, May 2016

We explore differences between Black and White Non-Hispanic workers in the relationship between childhood exposure to religious workers and a worker's labor market outcomes thirty years later. We identify this relationship by exploiting two sources of var...

Does the EITC Buffer against Neighborhood Transition? Evidence from Washington, DC

By LaTanya Brown-Robertson, Marcus Casey, Bradley Hardy, and Daniel Muhammad

American Economic Review, May 2016

Gentrification in major cities has led to concerns that poor and nonwhite residents are being displaced. This paper uses administrative data on tax filing households in Washington DC to examine the potential role that increases in the Earned Income Tax Cr...