Gender Equality and Positive Action: Evidence from UK Universities

By Danula K. Gamage and Almudena Sevilla

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper examines the impact of the Athena Scientific Women's Academic Network (SWAN) Charter on the wages and employment trajectories of female faculty. The Athena SWAN Charter is a gender equality initiative that formally recognizes good practice to...

Does Simple Information Provision Lead to More Diverse Classrooms? Evidence from a Field Experiment on Undergraduate Economics

By Amanda Bayer, Syon P. Bhanot, and Fernando Lozano

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper reports the results of a field experiment involving 2,710 students across nine US colleges, in which faculty provided incoming women and URM students with information about economics. We randomly assign students to one of three conditions: a co...

The Gender Socialization of Children Growing Up in Nontraditional Families

By Marianne Bertrand

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We study how childhood exposure to a nontraditional family (a working married mother, a married mother that is the primary breadwinner, or a non-married mother) affects gender role attitudes in young adulthood. Boys and girls develop more liberal gender a...

Child Penalties across Countries: Evidence and Explanations

By Henrik Kleven, Camille Landais, Johanna Posch, Andreas Steinhauer, and Josef Zweimüller

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper provides evidence on child penalties in female and male earnings in different countries. The estimates are based on event studies around the birth of the first child, using the specification proposed by Kleven et al. (2018). The analysis reveal...

Parental Aspirations for Children's Education: Is There a "Girl Effect"? Experimental Evidence from Rural Ethiopia

By Tanguy Bernard, Stefan Dercon, Kate Orkin, and Alemayehu Seyoum Taffesse

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We report on an experiment with poor rural households in Ethiopia, which aimed to boost aspirations for a better future through exposure to documentaries featuring local male and female role models. We explore effects on parents' educational aspirations...

Entertainment, Education, and Attitudes Toward Domestic Violence

By Abhijit Banerjee, Eliana La Ferrara, and Victor Orozco

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We study attitudes towards domestic violence in a sample of young women and men exposed to the edutainment TV series MTV Shuga 3, which features a sub-plot on this theme, and in a sample that was not. We measure viewers' memory of the characters and ident...

Changing Family Attitudes to Promote Female Employment

By Joshua T. Dean and Seema Jayachandran

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

India's female employment rate is one of the lowest in the world. One approach to expanding female employment is to make young women's family members more supportive of them working. We report on the effects of two interventions aimed at increasing family...

Now You See Me, Now You Don't: The Geography of Police Stops

By Jesse J. Kalinowski, Matthew B. Ross, and Stephen L. Ross

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper uses state police stop data in Texas to assess patrol activity. We find that both the types of stops and allocation of resources over space change in darkness relative to daylight, and that the changes in stop type and manpower allocation are c...

Using Shifts in Deployment and Operations to Test for Racial Bias in Police Stops

By John M. MacDonald and Jeffrey Fagan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We rely on a policy experiment in the New York City Police Department (NYPD) to address the well-known problems of omitted variable bias and infra-marginality in traditional outcomes tests of racial bias in police stops. The NYPD designated specific areas...

Police Use of Force as an Extension of Arrests: Examining Disparities across Civilian and Officer Race

By Emily K. Weisburst

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

The United States is embroiled in an important debate about police use of force tactics. I find that black civilians are disproportionately likely to be involved in a use of force incident during an arrest, examining data from Dallas, Texas. However, this...

The Introduction of Tasers and Police Use of Firearms: Evidence from the Chicago Police Department

By Bocar Ba and Jeffrey Grogger

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Many police jurisdictions have recently expanded their Taser arsenals with a goal of reducing officer-involved shootings. We analyze substitution between Tasers and firearms by means of an event study made possible by a policy change at the Chicago Police...

Disenfranchisement and Economic Inequality: Downstream Effects of Shelby County v. Holder

By Abhay P. Aneja and Carlos F. Avenancio-León

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

The 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) is considered by many to be the most effective civil rights law ever passed. In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down important provisions from the VRA in Shelby County v. Holder. This paper first discusses how the ...

Labor Market Conditions and Discrimination: Is There a Link?

By Karl David Boulware and Kenneth N. Kuttner

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper's goal is to determine whether the degree of labor market tightness affects the frequency of discrimination charges. State-level panel data on enforcement and litigation actions from the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, along with di...

Student Debt and Labor Market Outcomes

By Gerald Eric Daniels Jr. and Andria Smythe

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We study the impact of student debt on various labor market outcomes, namely, income, hourly wages, and hours worked. Using the NLSY97 and a difference-in-difference approach, we find statistically significant differences in labor market outcomes for indi...

Minimum Wages, Morality, and Efficiency: A Choice Experiment

By Conor Lennon, Jose Fernandez, Stephan Gohmann, and Keith Teltser

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We use a choice experiment to examine public support for minimum wages. We first elicit respondents' moral assessment of two labor market systems: one with a minimum wage and one without. Then, we present four pairs of hypothetical employment outcomes and...

The Burgeoning Health Care Needs of Aging Prisoners

By Hessam Bavafa and Anita Mukherjee

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We estimate the increasing health care needs of American inmates by combining data on inmate demographics and national health trends. Decades of harsh punishment combined with demographic shifts have led to a "greying" prison population that is a source o...

Examining Medicaid Expansion and the Treatment of Substance Use Disorders

By Jevay Grooms and Alberto Ortega

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

As the drug epidemic continues to cripple communities and disrupt our country, identifying and understanding state and federal policies which have helped alleviate the burden of substance use disorders (SUDs) is imperative. In 2010, the passage of the Pat...

Drug Violence, Immigration Enforcement, and Selectivity: Evidence from Mexican Immigrants

By Heriberto Gonzalez-Lozano and Sandra Orozco-Aleman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We study how drug violence in Mexico and internal immigration enforcement in the United States affect the selectivity of Mexican immigrants. We find that violence is associated with an increase in English proficiency among immigrants. Furthermore, the det...

The Child Left Behind: Parental Incarceration and Adult Human Capital in the United States

By Laura E. Henkhaus

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Exposure to parental incarceration is particularly prevalent in the United States, where about 7 percent of children have lived with a parent who was incarcerated. In this paper, I use nationally representative US data and apply partial identification met...

How (Not) to Allocate Affordable Housing

By Nick Arnosti and Peng Shi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We describe the wait-list procedure used in Providence and the lotteries used in New York City, and argue that despite their apparent differences, these systems should lead to similar outcomes. Neither approach effectively uses applicants' preferences to ...