Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal? a field experiment on labor market discrimination

May 27, 200

Gender identity and relative income within households

We examine causes and consequences of relative income within households. We establish that gender identity – in particular, an aversion to the wife earning more than the husband-impacts marriage formation, the wife’s labor force participation, the wife’s income conditional on working, satisfaction with the marriage, divorce, and the division of home production. The distribution of the share of household income earned by the wife exhibits a sharp cliff at 0.5, which suggests that a couple is less willing to match if her income exceeds his. Within marriage markets, when a randomly chosen woman becomes more likely to earn more than a randomly chosen man, marriage rates decline. Within couples, if the wife’s potential income (based on her demographics) is likely to exceed the husband’s, the wife is less likely to be in the labor force and earns less than her potential if she does work. Couples where the wife earns more than the husband are less satisfied with their marriage and are more likely to divorce. Finally, based on time use surveys, the gender gap in non-market work is larger if the wife earns more than the husband

Managing With Style: The Effect of Managers on Firm Policies

This paper investigates whether and how individual managers affect corporate behavior and performance. We construct a manager-firm matched panel data set which enables us to track the top managers across different firms over time. We find that manager fixed effects matter for a wide range of corporate decisions. A significant extent of the heterogeneity in investment, financial and organizational practices of firms can be explained by the presence of manager fixed effects. We identify specific patterns in managerial decision making that appear to indicate general differences in "style" across managers. Moreover, we show that management style is significantly related to manager fixed effects in performance and that managers with higher performance fixed effects receive higher compensation and are more likely to be found in better governed firms. In a final step, we tie back these findings to observable managerial characteristics. We find that executives from earlier birth cohorts appear on average to be more conservative; on the other hand, managers who hold an MBA degree seem to follow on average more aggressive strategies