Research

We estimate the effect of unplanned children on the careers of women identified from failures of long-acting reversible birth contraceptives. Using linked health and labor market data from Sweden, we find that unplanned pregnancies halt women's career progression resulting in income losses of 20% by five years after the initial contraceptive failure. The detrimental effects of unplanned pregnancies are larger for younger women and women enrolled in education, suggesting that unplanned births are particularly disruptive early in the career. In contrast, when we study the impact of children identified from quasi-random success of fertilization procedures, we find small impacts of children. Taken together, the results suggest that children can have large disruptive effects on careers, and by timing pregnancy women mitigate these disruptions.

This paper provides the first causal evidence that gender affects the information an individual receives about careers. We conduct a large-scale field experiment in which real college students seek career information from 10,000 working professionals. We randomize whether a professional receives a message from a male or a female student. When students ask broadly for information about a career, female students receive substantially more information on work/life balance relative to male students. This gender difference persists even when students specifically state an interest in learning about work/life balance. We develop a new methodology to combine our experimental estimates with student preferences for professionals. Allowing students to choose which professionals they interact with does not reduce gender disparities in access to information, nor does it align the information students receive with the information they demand. The conversations students have with professionals matter: information on work/life balance deters students from their preferred career path.

This paper links rich survey data on temporal and spatial job flexibility measures with matched employer-employee administrative data to understand the relationship between job characteristics and gender pay gaps. Motherhood is associated with a move to set schedules, shorter hours and moves away from jobs requiring a worker to be on-call and jobs entailing evening work. We find that controlling for these amenities at the firm level explains a substantial portion of the overall movement of women to different types of firms around motherhood both in terms of pay-premiums and in terms of revealed-preference measures of firm quality such as pagerank or the poaching rate. To directly estimate the value of these amenities to workers, we conduct an incentivized hypothetical choice preference elicitation exercise in which workers make choices between jobs with different amenities and wages. This exercise suggests that compared to men, women have a strong aversion to jobs requiring on-call work, jobs with evening work, and jobs which do not allow flexibility in dealing with family concerns. Accounting for the value of these amenities gives a gender gap in compensation which is 20% smaller than the gender gap in pay.

In 2022, the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization removed federal protections for abortion, prompting significant changes in reproductive health behaviors. This study examines the impact of the Dobbs ruling on contraceptive and sterilization decisions, comparing states perceived as hostile to abortion with those that were not. Using MarketScan data on millions of employees' use of healthcare, we find that the ruling led to an 11\% increase in female sterilization procedures and a 13\% increase in male sterilization procedures in abortion-hostile states. Additionally, women in these states shifted from short-acting reversible contraceptives (SARCs) to long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs), which are more effective.

Using Danish matched employer-employee data, I compare the relative pay of men and women to their relative productivity as measured by production function estimation. I find that the gender "productivity gap" is 8 percent, implying that almost two thirds of the residual gender wage gap is due to productivity differences between men and women. Motherhood plays an important role, yet it also reveals a puzzle: the pay gap for mothers is entirely explained by productivity, whereas the gap for non-mothers is not. In addition, the decoupling of pay and productivity for women without children happens during their prime-child bearing years. These estimates are robust to a variety of specifications for the impact of observables on productivity, and robust to accounting for endogenous sorting of women into less productive firms using a control-function approach. This paper also provides estimates of the productivity gap across industries and occupations, finding the same general patterns for mothers compared to women without children within these subgroups.

It is common for mentorship programs to use race, gender, and nationality to match mentors and mentees. Despite the popularity of these programs, there is little evidence on whether mentees value mentors with shared traits. Using novel administrative data from an online college mentoring platform connecting students and alumni, we document that female students indeed disproportionately reach out to female mentors. To disentangle whether this observed homophily is explained by taste-based or statistical discrimination, we implement a preference elicitation survey paired with an within-survey experiment. We find that homophily is entirely explained by a lack of information on mentor quality. We discuss the implications of these results for the design of initiatives that match on shared traits.

We document the declining gap between the average earnings of women and men in Denmark from 1980 to 2010. The decline in the earnings gap is driven by increases in hours worked by women as well as a decline in the gender wage gap. The data show a great deal of segregation across education tracks, occupations, and even workplaces, but this segregation has declined since 1980. These changes in segregation have been accompanied by a reduction in the role of observables in explaining the gender wage gap. The residual gender wage gap has been constant since 1980. The hours gap is not affected by changes in segregation at the occupation and education level: differences in these characteristics for women relative to men do not contribute to the hours gap in 2010 and they did not in 1980. However, a firm-worker fixed effects analysis suggests that 30 percent of the gender hours gap can be explained by the sorting of women into lower-hours workplaces. The hours gap is driven by mothers, the group for whom differences in employer, occupation, education, and experience also imply large differences in wages. The combined effect of hours and wages is a more than 20 percent gender earnings gap among well-attached (halftime-plus) workers between 25 and 60 years old, 10 percent of which cannot be explained by differences in hours, or in the readily observable characteristics of these workers.

Gender differences in professional networks have been shown to contribute to men’s 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 from a student-alumni professional networking website, we study gender differences in student network usage, holding network access fixed. Focusing on messages sent by students to alumni, we document that male and female students network similarly, both in terms of the number of messages sent and the specific questions asked. Furthermore, there are only small gender differences in question tone.

This paper examines aggregate time series data on individual charitable donations from 1968 to 2007. We find that changes in individual giving show an asymmetric response to changes in the S&P 500: individuals are more responsive to stock market upturns than downturns.

This paper studies the effects of parental leave on firms by examining a 2002 Danish reform which increased the length of fully-compensated parental leave by 22 weeks. Because the policy change imposed no direct costs on firms, was retroactively applied and unanticipated, it offers a unique setting in which to study the effects of major expansions of paid parental leave. The expansion has a negative effect on firm survival and the retention of mothers. Perhaps surprisingly, there is no effect of the reform on coworker earnings in the short or long run, but there is evidence of stress on coworkers in other dimensions: coworkers who change jobs have lower earnings in the short run as a result of the policy change and some coworkers delay children.

In this paper, we present the results of a natural field experiment in which workers operated telephones soliciting funds for a major charity in the US. We find that incentives increase targeted performance at the cost of other dimensions of a worker's task. Incentivized workers were paid for the fraction of pledges-promises to donate at a later date-which they secured. Pledges were 50% higher for callers paid a commission relative to callers paid a flat rate. However actual donations (excluding outliers) were 17% lower when a donor was called by a caller paid a commission rather than a flat rate. Incentives also caused workers to break the rules of their employment in order to increase their pay. Commission-based pay caused rule-breaking to nearly double. Finally, in our experiment, workers with different types of compensation worked at the same time and could observe one another's performance. We use the randomization-induced variation in worker performance to study whether incentives benefit firms via peer-effects. We find no evidence that productivity increases spill over onto peers, however, we find that rule-breaking generated by incentives does spill over onto peers.