2022 Economics Seminars

2022 Seminar Speakers

Violence Against Women at Work
Abstract: Conflict between colleagues is a common occurrence. In this paper, we show that the victim’s gender affects how firms respond to these incidents. We link information on every police report in Finland to administrative records to identify assaults between colleagues, and the economic outcomes for victims and the wider firm. The overwhelming majority of perpetrators are male, while 50% of victims are female. Colleague violence has a significant negative impact on the labor market outcomes of victims, with greater employment and earnings losses for female victims. Surprisingly, the negative impacts of workplace violence on female victims are larger than for their male perpetrators, while the opposite is true for male-on-male workplace violence. In addition, an incident of male-on-female colleague violence causes a decline in women hires, resulting in a 10% decline in the average share of women employees at these firms. There is no significant change in the composition of the workforce following male-on-male colleague violence. We show that the decline in women hires is isolated to male-managed firms. In contrast, we find no change in within-network hiring amongst affected firms suggesting that firm decisions on hiring drive the decline in female employees rather than changes in the gender composition of applicants.

Matching with Multilateral Contracts
Abstract: In many environments, agents form agreements which are multilateral and/or have externalities. We show that stable outcomes exist in these environments when the irrelevance of rejected contracts condition survives aggregation, either among all agents or within two implicit sides of the market for whom contracts are substitutes. In settings where agents are strategically sophisticated, in the sense that they make correct conjectures about how other agents will choose from each set of contracts, the survival of IRC under aggregation is equivalent to a robustness criterion on those conjectures. When each agent is strategically sophisticated about the behavior of all other agents, stable outcomes always exist: No conditions on preferences or market structure are necessary. Our characterization of these outcomes allows the application of matching theory to new settings, such as legislative bargaining or free trade agreement formation.

Social Information, Advice and Pro-Social Behavior: Experimental Evidence from Children in Colombia
Abstract: We conduct a lab-in-the-field experiment to investigate how the decisions or advice by parents, teachers, and student peers affect children’s pro-social behavior in Colombia. In the experiment, elementary school children conduct a real effort task and decide how to allocate their time between earning money for themselves and earning money for other children in need. The proportion allocated to help others is used to measure these children’s volunteering behavior. Their parents, teachers, or student peers also perform the same task and have an opportunity to send to these children information on their volunteering decisions or advice. Our results show a substantial, positive response in volunteering by these children to the advice by their parents, teachers, and peers. However, these children’s responses to information on their parents, teachers, and peers’ decisions exhibit a large degree of heterogeneity among the three sources and vary with cost. The children’s decisions are also correlated with their gender, age, and displacement. Our findings shed light on how advice giving may effectively influence children’s pro-social behavior at young ages.

The Causal Health Effects of Education–Who Benefits and When?
Abstract: We leverage both survey data and administrative health records to estimate the causal effects of education on health. We specifically exploit two compulsory schooling reforms in Britain that led to half of the population receiving an additional year of high school education. While our survey data provide little evidence of an education-health gradient, administrative records suggests that reform led to significantly lower hospitalization rates for men experiencing the later of the two reforms–with these benefits primarily stemming from improvements in digestive health, cardiovascular health, and lower rates of alcohol abuse. These findings are consistent with theoretical predictions suggesting that the greatest health productivity gains takes place among middle-age adults relative to older or younger populations.

The Changing Life Cycle Profile of Male and Female Wages Across Cohorts
Abstract: We estimate the distribution of life cycle wages for cohorts of men and women in the presence of nonrandom sample selection. The quantile selection model can consistently recover the full distribution of offer wages for workers and nonworkers, permitting us to construct gender- and education-specific age-wage profiles, as well as measures of life cycle inequality within- and between-education groups and gender. We find that controlling for common within-group time effects has a substantial equalizing force across cohorts of life cycle wages, suggesting that the rising return to skill feeding increasing between-skill group wage inequality over the life cycle in recent cohorts was partially mitigated by less favorable time effects relative to older cohorts of workers. We find that the gender wage gap increases sharply across the distribution in the first half of the life cycle, coinciding with fertility cycles of women. After age 40, there has been substantial gender wage convergence in recent cohorts relative to those born prior to the 1950s.