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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 pervasive in the discipline, even among students in the earliest stages of their training? In this paper, we provide direct evidence on the importance of explicit and implicit biases against women among students in economics relative to other fields. We conducted a large scale survey among undergraduate students in Chilean universities, among both entering first-year students and students in years 2 and above. The survey elicits measures of implicit bias, explicit bias, and gender attitudes. We document that, on a wide battery of measures, economics students are more biased than students in other fields. There is some evidence that economics students are more biased already upon entry, before exposure to any economic classes. The gap becomes substantially more pronounced among students in years 2 and above, in particular for male students. We also find evidence of an increase in bias in a sample of students that we can follow longitudinally. Differences in political ideology and religiosity explain essentially all the gap at entry, but none of the increase in the gap with exposure. Exposure to female students and female professors attenuates some of the bias of economics students.

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 marriage and the socioeconomic status of husbands. This socioeconomic gradient becomes steeper over time. We investigate the degree to which it can be explained by occupational income divergence across geographic regions. Regional divergence explains about one half of the socioeconomic divergence in the probability of marriage, and almost all of the increase in marital sorting. Differences in urbanization rates and the share of foreign-born across states drive most of these differences, while other factors (the scholarization rate, the sex ratio and the share in manufacturing) play a smaller role.

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 promoting more environmental regulation and control in the year after the disaster. The response to hurricanes does not seem to be driven by logrolling behavior or lobbysts' pressure. The change in legislative agenda is persistent over time, and it is associated with an electoral penalty in the following elections. The response is mainly promoted by representatives in safe districts, those with more experience, and those with strong pro-environment records. Our evidence thus reveals that natural disasters may trigger a permanent change in politicians' beliefs, but only those with a sufficient electoral strength or with strong ideologies are willing to engage in promoting policies with short-run costs and long-run benefits.

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 distinct preferences for cooperativeness, including regression discontinuity and matching. After accounting for selection, we find that among Democrats there is no significant gender gap in the number of cosponsors recruited, but women-sponsored bills tend to have fewer cosponsors from the opposite party. On the other hand, we find robust evidence that Republican women recruit more cosponsors and attract more bipartisan support on the bills that they sponsor. This is particularly true on bills that address issues more relevant for women, over which female Republicans have possibly preferences that are closer to those of Democrats. We interpret these results as evidence that cooperation is mostly driven by a commonality of interest, rather than gender per se.

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 composition of the top layer based on direct survey data: the fraction of women among top managers, and the fraction of women among working proprietors. We document the following facts: a) There is a strong negative association between the fraction of women in the top layer of management and several establishment outcomes, among them business volume, investment, total wage bill per worker, total employment, and turnover; b) Establishments with a high fraction of women in the top layer of management are more likely to implement female-friendly policies, such as providing childcare facilities or promoting and mentoring female junior staff; c) The fraction of women in the top layer of management is also negatively associated with employment and wages, both male and female, full-time and part-time. However, all of these associations vanish when we include establishment fixed effects and establishment-specific time trends. This reveals a substantial sorting of female managers across establishments: small and less productive establishments that invest less, pay their employees lower wages, but are more female-friendly are more likely to be led by women.

This paper provides a new perspective on intergenerational mobility in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We devise an empirical strategy that allows to calculate intergenerational elasticities between fathers and children of both sexes. The key insight of our approach is that the information about socioeconomic status conveyed by first names can be used to create a pseudo-link not only between fathers and sons, but also between fathers and daughters. The latter is typically not possible with historical data. We find that the father-son elasticity in economic status grows throughout the sample period. Intergenerational elasticities for daughters follow a broadly similar trend, but with some differences in timing. We argue that most of the increase in the intergenerational elasticity estimate in the early part of the 20th Century can be accounted for by the vast regional disparities in economic development, with increasing returns to human capital contributing to explain the residual. Other mechanisms such as changes in fertility, migration, and investment in public schooling, appear to have had only a minor role in explaining the trends.

This paper studies gender interactions within hierarchical organizations using a large data set on the duration of Italian municipal governments elected between 1993 and 2003. A municipal government can be viewed as a hierarchy, whose stability over time depends on the degree of cooperation between and within ranks. We find that in municipalities headed by female mayors, the probability of early termination of the legislature is higher. This result persists and becomes stronger when we control for municipality fixed effects as well as non-random sorting of women into municipalities using regression discontinuity in gender-mixed electoral races decided by a narrow margin. The likelihood that a female mayor survives until the end of her term is lowest when the council is entirely male, and in regions with less favorable attitudes towards working women. The evidence is suggestive that female mayors are less able at fostering cooperation among men, or alternatively, that men are more reluctant to be headed by women. Other interpretations receive less support in the data. Our results may provide an alternative explanation for the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions.

This paper examines how violence in the Second Intifada influences Palestinian public opinion. Using micro data from a series of opinion polls linked to data on fatalities, we find that Israeli violence against Palestinians leads them to support more radical factions and more radical attitudes towards the conflict. This effect is temporary, however, and vanishes completely within 90 days. We also find some evidence that Palestinian fatalities lead to the polarization of the population and to increased disaffection and a lack of support for any faction. Geographically proximate Palestinian fatalities have a larger effect than those that are distant, while Palestinian fatalities in targeted killings have a smaller effect relative to other fatalities. Although overall Israeli fatalities do not seem to affect Palestinian public opinion, when we divide those fatalities by the different factions claiming responsibility for them, we find some evidence that increased Israeli fatalities are effective in increasing support for the faction that claimed them.

This paper uses data from nine tennis Grand Slam tournaments played between 2005 and 2007 to assess whether men and women respond differently to competitive pressure in a setting with large monetary rewards. In particular, it asks whether the quality of the game deteriorates as the stakes become higher. The paper conducts two parallel analyses, one based on aggregate set-level data, and one based on detailed point-by-point data, which is available for a selected subsample of matches in four of the nine tournaments under examination. The set-level analysis indicates that both men and women perform less well in the final and decisive set of the match. This result is robust to controls for the length of the match and to the inclusion of match and player-specific fixed effects. The drop in performance of women in the decisive set is slightly larger than that of men, but the difference is not statistically significant at conventional levels. On the other hand, the detailed point-by-point analysis reveals that, relative to men, women are substantially more likely to make unforced errors at crucial junctures of the match. Data on serve speed, on first serve percentages and on rally length suggest that women play a more conservative and less aggressive strategy as points become more important. I present a simple game-theoretic model that shows that a less aggressive strategy may be a player’s best response to an increase in the intrinsic probability of making unforced errors.

In this study we extend our previous work to examine the dynamic relationship between violence committed by Palestinian factions and that committed by Israel during the Second Intifada. We find a statistically significant relationship between Israeli fatalities claimed by groups associated with the ruling political party, Fatah, and subsequent Palestinian fatalities. We do not find a similar relationship for Israeli fatalities claimed by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other Palestinian factions. We conjecture that these differences are due to the different positions of the factions vis-à-vis bargaining over a two-state solution to the conflict as well as the organizational structures of the factions.

This paper studies the dynamics of violence in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict since the outbreak of the Second (or 'Al-Aqsa') Intifada in September 2000, during which more than 3,300 Palestinians and more than 1,000 Israelis have been killed. The conflict has followed an uneven pattern, with periods of high levels of violence and periods of relative calm. Using data on the number of deaths occurring each day between September 2000 and January 2005, we estimate reaction functions for both Israelis and Palestinians and find evidence of unidirectional Granger causality from Palestinian violence to Israeli violence, but not vice versa. This finding is consistent whether we look only at the incidence of fatalities or whether we look at the level of fatalities, and is robust to the specification of the lag structure and the level of time aggregation. We find little evidence that violence on either side has a direct deterrent or incapacitation effect. We do find, however, that successful assassination attempts do reduce the number of subsequent Israeli fatalities. We conclude that, despite the popular perception that Palestinians and Israelis are engaged in 'tit-for-tat' violence, there is no evidence to support that notion.

This paper uses the mass migration wave to Israel in the 1990s to examine the impact of immigrant concentration during elementary school on the long-term academic outcomes of native students in high school. To identify the causal effect of immigrant children on their native peers, the empirical strategy must address two sources of bias: the endogenous sorting of immigrants across schools, and the endogenous grade placement of immigrants within schools. We control for the endogeneity of immigrant placement across schools by conditioning on the total number of immigrants in a school and exploit random variation in the number of immigrants across grades within the same school. To address the endogenous grade placement of immigrants within schools, we use the immigrants' dates of birth as an instrument for their actual grade placement. The results suggest that the overall presence of immigrants in a grade had a significant and large adverse effect on two important outcomes for Israeli natives: the dropout rate and the chances of passing the high school matriculation exam which is necessary to attend college.

This Paper studies the impact of mass migration from the Former Soviet Union to Israel on natives’ probability of moving from employment to non-employment in a segmented labour market that is defined by various combinations of schooling, occupation, industry, district of residence and experience. We find that the share of immigrants in a given labour market segment is generally positively associated with the probability of natives to move from employment in that segment to non-employment, both for males and females. When segment fixed-effects are added, this effect all but disappears for females, and is substantially reduced for males. We conclude that immigrants are negatively selected into occupations with high turnover and that natives were not facing higher probability to exit employment due to immigrants’ presence in a certain occupation. Allowing the effect to vary across natives with different levels of education and experience reveals that, young men, educated men and workers in the private sector are adversely affected by the presence of immigrants.

This Paper studies the dynamic impact of mass migration from the Former Soviet Union to Israel on natives’ labour market outcomes. Specifically, we attempt to distinguish between the short-run and long-run effects of immigrants on natives’ wages and employment. The transition of immigrants into a new labour market is a gradual process: the dynamics of this process come from immigrants’ occupational mobility and from adjustments by local factors of production. Natives may therefore face changing labour market conditions, even years after the arrival of the immigrants. If immigrants are relatively good substitutes for native workers, we expect that the impact of immigration will be largest immediately upon the immigrants’ arrival, and may become smaller as the labor market adjusts to the supply shock. Conversely, if immigrants upon arrival are poor substitutes for natives because of their lack of local human capital, the initial effect of immigration is small, and the effect increases as immigrants acquire local labour market skills and compete with native workers. We empirically examine these alternative hypotheses using data from Israel’s Labor Force and Income Surveys from 1989 to 1999. We find that wages of both men and women are negatively correlated with the fraction of immigrants with little local experience in a given labour market segment. A 10% increase in the share of immigrants lowers natives’ wages in the short run by 1 to 3%, but this effect dissolves after 4 to 7 years. This result is robust to a variety of different segmentations of the labour market, to the inclusion of cohort effects, and to different dynamic structures in the residual term of the wage equation. On the other hand, we do not find any effect of immigration on employment, neither in the short nor in the long run.

This Paper estimates the structural parameters of a job search model with hyperbolic discounting and endogenous search effort. It estimates quantitatively the degree of hyperbolic discounting, and assesses its implications for the impact of various policy interventions aimed at reducing unemployment. The model is estimated using data on unemployment spells and accepted wages from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). The likelihood function explicitly incorporates all the restrictions implied by the optimal dynamic programming solution to the model. Both observed and unobserved heterogeneity are accounted for. The results point to a substantial degree of hyperbolic discounting, especially for low and medium wage workers. The structural estimates are also used to evaluate alternative policy interventions for the unemployed. Estimates based on a model with exponential discounting may lead to biased inference on the economic impact of policies.

This Paper demonstrates that women search longer for their first or second husband in cities with higher male wage inequality, and analyses several explanations for this result. A causal link is established by showing that the results are robust to the inclusion of city fixed-effects and city-specific time trends, and by using inequality in the woman’s state of birth as a proxy for the local level of male inequality. Increasing male inequality explains about 30% of the marriage rate decline for women over the last few decades, and we show that this is not due to the effects of male inequality on female inequality, female labour supply, or decisions by women to re-locate, nor to the decisions of men in reaction to changes in their own wages. The evidence supports the idea that higher male inequality increases the option value for single women to search longer for a husband.