"Contributing to most things": Richard Marsh, literary production, and the Fin de Siècle periodicals market

Franco Moretti has recently called for a "distant reading" which "focus[es] on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes - or genres and systems." For Moretti, such a reading involves a "process of deliberate reduction and abstraction," which produces "artificial constructs - graphs, maps, trees" and results in "a specific form of knowledge " quite different from "traditional" close readings of canonical literature. This article builds on Moretti's work, offering a statistical case study of the professional practice - production rates, generic choices, and writing patterns - of the bestselling popular author "Richard Marsh" (1857-1915). While the resulting graphs indicate patterns and trends in the career of one professional writer, their abstract nature also suggests ways in which we might approach the work of other authors, indeed, authorship itself, through statistical analysis

Gender Differences in Sorting

In this paper, we investigate the sorting of workers in rms to understand gender gaps in labor market outcomes. Using Danish employer-employee matched data, we find strong evidence of glass ceilings in certain firms, especially after motherhood, preventing women from climbing the career ladder and causing the most productive female workers to seek better jobs in more female-friendly firms in which they can pursue small career advancements. Nonetheless, gender differences in promotion persist and are found to be similar in all firms when we focus on large career advancements. These results provide evidence of the sticky floor hypothesis, which, together with the costs associated with changing employer, generates persistent gender gaps