We present new findings about the relationship between marriage and socioeconomic background in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Imputing socioeconomic status of family of origin from first names, we document a socioeconomic gradient for women in the probability of...

This paper exploits the episode provided by the mass migration from the former Soviet Union to Israel in the 1990s to study the effect high skill immigration on productivity. Using a unique data set on manufacturing firms, I investigate directly whether firms and industries with a higher...

In this paper we use a large linked employer-employee data set on German establishments between 1993 and 2012 to investigate how the gender composition of the top layer of management affects a variety of establishment and worker outcomes. We use two different measures to identify the gender...

This paper studies how politicians and voters respond to new information on the threats of climate change. Using data on the universe of federal disaster declarations between 1989 and 2014, we document that congress members from districts hit by a hurricane are more likely to support bills...

Recent research has highlighted unequal treatment for women in academic economics along several different dimensions: promotion, hiring, credit for co-authorship, and standards for publication in professional journals. Can the source of these differences lie in biases against women that are...

This paper uses data on bill sponsorship and cosponsorship in the U.S. House of Representatives to estimate gender differences in cooperative behavior. We employ a number of econometric methodologies to address the potential selection of female representatives into electoral districts with...

This chapter traces the evolution of the study of gender in the labor market, focusing on how academic thinking on this topic has evolved alongside real world developments in gender inequality from the 1980s to the present. We present a simple model of female labor supply to illustrate how...

Gender wage and employment gaps are negatively correlated across countries. We argue that non-random selection of women into work explains an important part of such correlation and thus of the observed variation in wage gaps. The idea is that, if women who are employed tend to have relatively...

This paper explores a novel mechanism of gender identity formation. Specifically, we explore how the work behavior of a teenager's own mother, as well as that of her friends' mothers, affect her work decisions in adulthood. The first mechanism is commonly included in economic models. The second,...

Maternal mortality was the second-leading cause of death for women in childbearing years up until the mid-1930s in the United States. For each death, twenty times as many mothers were estimated to suffer pregnancy-related conditions, often leading to severe and prolonged disablement. Poor...