Monday, December 31, 2012
Sunday, December 30, 2012
Movies
I recently watched The Hobbit, and it seems they added a female character (just for a few minutes) only so that there would be at least one woman character in the movie...
This reminds me of the Bechdel Test and click here for overall statistics. The criteria are simple, movies are divided into four groups along whether they pass one or more of the following criteria: 1. It has to have at least two [named] women in it
2. Who talk to each other
3. About something besides a man
For more on female heroines in movies see the recent article in the NYTimes Magazine.
For stats on female scientists see the following Slate Article, and a slightly dated short summary plus compilation of links at "Female Scientists on the Big Screen".
This reminds me of the Bechdel Test and click here for overall statistics. The criteria are simple, movies are divided into four groups along whether they pass one or more of the following criteria: 1. It has to have at least two [named] women in it
2. Who talk to each other
3. About something besides a man
For more on female heroines in movies see the recent article in the NYTimes Magazine.
For stats on female scientists see the following Slate Article, and a slightly dated short summary plus compilation of links at "Female Scientists on the Big Screen".
Saturday, December 29, 2012
Friday, December 28, 2012
Publications in Economics
Daniel S. Hamermesh just posted a new paper as an NBER WP, "Six Decades of Top Economics Publishing: Who and How" (for a free copy, see here).
Female authors and coauthorship: "Using a sample of articles from these three journals for the 1990s, Anne Boschini and Anna Sjögren (2007) find women are less likely to coauthor than men. The probit and ordered probits [...] covering a much longer time period, weakly suggest the same conclusion. Moreover, an expanded specification that interacted gender with time showed that this difference has not changed over these six decades."
As a conclusion and maybe something to think about: "To the extent that economics faculties do not “divide by N” in judging young faculty members’ publications at tenure time, this deficit may also help explain the unusually high rates of “survival” without tenure among female economists."
What explains the low rate of female coauthoring? Could it be (i) preferences, (ii) opportunities, or potentially (iii) a (maybe only imagined) larger penalty from coauthoring than for others?
The abstract reads:
"Presenting data on all full-length articles published in the three top general economics journals for one year in each of the 1960s through 2010s, I analyze how patterns of co-authorship, age structure and methodology have changed, and what the possible causes of these changes may have been. The entire distribution of number of authors has shifted steadily rightward. In the last two decades the fraction of older authors has almost quadrupled. The top journals are now publishing many fewer papers that represent pure theory, regardless of sub-field, somewhat less empirical work based on publicly available data sets, and many more empirical studies based on data assembled for the study by the author(s) or on laboratory or field experiments."
So, good news for my more senior senior colleagues.
There is also some interesting statistic on female authors:
.."the sharp increase in the fraction of authors who are women, with the share of female authors nearly tripling over this period. [...] While the share of female authors in the 1963 and 1973
samples is not much different from the female share of new doctorates in those years, however,
the growing share of female doctorates far outpaced the growing share of authors in these top
journals. [...] Categorizing authorship by age and gender, it is notable that in 2003 and 2011 women ages 35 or less accounted for 16 percent of all authors in that age group, an increase, but still far below the 29 percent female representation among assistant professors at Ph.D.-granting
institutions in 2011-12 (AEA, 2012). Whatever the causation, perhaps this deficit explains the
greater (and uniquely greater to economics) female survival rate without tenure in this profession
(Donna Ginther and Shulamit Kahn, 2004). "
On coauthorship: "Many students of the sociology of economics have pointed out the increase in coauthorship (e.g., Aidan Hollis, 2001), which [...] has proceeded over the entire last half century. What is less well known is that the frequency distribution of the number of authors per article has been moving steadily rightwards.." And "Fifty-five percent of the two-authored papers in the
sample are produced by people within five years of age (and in 2011 only two represented
collaborations between young faculty and their current or recent Ph.D. student). The only
(weak) evidence for this inference (NOTE: namely that "much of the coauthorship might be of the older European model, with the senior professor co-authoring with his/her Ph.D. student/recent graduate") is that in only 35 percent of the 85 three-authored articles is the average absolute age difference among the authors five years or less, and in nearly half of them the oldest author is more than 10 years older than the youngest. At the very least, however, most the greater propensity of prime-age scholars to coauthor does not appear to be attributable chiefly to their publishing with Ph.D. students."
Female authors and coauthorship: "Using a sample of articles from these three journals for the 1990s, Anne Boschini and Anna Sjögren (2007) find women are less likely to coauthor than men. The probit and ordered probits [...] covering a much longer time period, weakly suggest the same conclusion. Moreover, an expanded specification that interacted gender with time showed that this difference has not changed over these six decades."
As a conclusion and maybe something to think about: "To the extent that economics faculties do not “divide by N” in judging young faculty members’ publications at tenure time, this deficit may also help explain the unusually high rates of “survival” without tenure among female economists."
What explains the low rate of female coauthoring? Could it be (i) preferences, (ii) opportunities, or potentially (iii) a (maybe only imagined) larger penalty from coauthoring than for others?
Thursday, December 27, 2012
Toys and girls
While looking for toys for my nephews, I indeed found myself surprised by how gender conscious many toys are. Have a look at the recent NYtimes article and on NPR
Tuesday, December 25, 2012
Christkind
For those of you who come from Austria, like me, or Switzerland or the southern part of Germany, the children received gifts from the Christkind (often depicted as a sort of blondisch girl, that flies through the window to bring the gifts), while in many other parts the ChristmasMan, as we call him, or pere Noel or Santa Claus brings the gifts...
Have a peaceful day today,
Have a peaceful day today,
Monday, December 24, 2012
Paternalism, Dead Weight Loss of Giving and Giving Directly
While there are many articles on the dead-weight loss of Christmas (See Joel Waldfogel's paper of that title), my Coauthor Paul Niehaus, together with Michael Faye, Rohit Wanchoo, and Jeremy Shapiro investigates a similar idea on charitable donations, specifically to the poor in Africa.
His work has recently been featured in The Atlantic: Can 4 Economists Build the Most Economically Efficient Charity Ever? The premise on GiveDirectly is to "directly to the poor with no strings attached--no requirement to launch a business or to immunize one's child; no distribution of bed nets, solar lanterns, or goats."
Merry Christmas, Frohe Weihnachten, Joyeux Noel
I wish you all a merry Christmas, ein frohes und besinnliches Fest et joyeux Noel
Sunday, December 23, 2012
Signaling and Dating
Al Roth has received his Nobel prize for "the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design". The methods discussed in the announcement have been used in markets for medical professionals, to allocate students to schools and kidney exchange. However, already in early interviews, Al talked about how matching deals with the most important decisions of one's life, including, finding a spouse. Clearly this has attracted lots of attention, as it captures the imagination of everyone, or, as swedisch TV reporter Bengt Norborg said, "everyone can relate to it".
So, dating and signaling, and as such my theory work (see Coles, Peter, Alexey Kushnir and Muriel Niederle, “Preference Signaling in Matching Markets”, American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, forthcoming) and the applications of signaling on the economics job market (see Peter Coles, John Cawley, Phillip B. Levine, Muriel Niederle, Alvin E. Roth, and John J. Siegfried, “The Job Market for New Economists: A Market Design Perspective,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2010) and on online dating (see Lee, Soohyung and Muriel Niederle, “Propose with a Rose? Signaling in Internet Dating Markets,” November 2011) received lots of attention.
For example, see around min 10:50 - 13:40 of Al Roth's Nobel interview at http://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=1885
or at Al's lecture at around min 36:40
http://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=1879
or the TV feature on Swedish TV at
http://www.svtplay.se/klipp/894106/portratt-ekonomipriset-till-minne-av-alfred-nobel
While signaling is a great topic, and has been in the news a lot lately (it'll be in the news again in the Spring, when parents are deciding which of the colleges among the ones their children applied they want to visit) there are still many open questions.
For recent news (HT Scott Kominers) see the WSJ article: "Facebook Tests Charging $1 to Send Some Messages"
Saturday, December 22, 2012
Gender, Education and Marriage
There have been a few papers recently that discuss the impact of being highly educated or having high earnings on the marriage market.
Two papers focus on Asia and the role of highly educated women on the marriage market.
For evidence in Asia, and the role of highly educated women on the market for imported women see Daiji Kawaguchi and Soohyung Lee "Brides for Sale: Cross-Border Marriages and Female Immigration" The abstract reads: "Every year, a large number of women migrate as brides from developing countries to developed countries in East Asia. This phenomenon virtually did not exist in the early 1990s, but foreign brides currently comprise 4 to 35 percent of newlyweds in these developed Asian countries. This paper argues that two factors account for this rapid increase in “bride importation”: the rapid growth of women's educational attainment and a cultural norm that leads to low net surplus of marriage for educated women. We provide empirical evidence supporting our theoretical model and its implications, using datasets from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore."
This effect is the content of the Harvard student Jisoo Hwang's JM paper: "Housewife, "Gold Miss," and Equal: The Evolution of Educated Women's Role in Asia and the U.S. "
Abstract: The fraction of U.S. college graduate women who ever marry has increased relative to less educated women since the mid-1970s. In contrast, college graduate women in developed Asian countries have had decreased rates of marriage, so much so that the term “Gold Misses” has been coined to describe them. This paper argues that the interaction of rapid economic growth in Asia combined with the intergenerational transmission of gender attitudes causes the “Gold Miss” phenomenon. Economic growth has increased the supply of college graduate women, but men’s preference for their wives’ household services has diminished less rapidly and is slowed by women’s role in their mothers’ generation. Using a dynamic model, I show that a large positive wage shock produces a greater mismatch between educated women and men in the marriage market than would gradual wage growth. I test the implications of the model using three data sets: the Japanese General Social Survey, the American Time Use Survey, and the U.S. Census and American Community Survey. Using the Japanese data, I find a positive relationship between a mother’s education (and employment) and her son’s gender attitudes. In the U.S., time spent on household chores among Asian women is inversely related to the female labor force participation rate in husband’s country of origin. Lastly, college graduate Korean and Japanese women in the U.S. have greater options in the marriage market. They are more likely to marry Americans than Korean and Japanese men do, and this gender gap is larger among the foreign born than the U.S. born.
Two paper have tackled the impact of education, demanding jobs, income and marital spouses in the US.
The first is a paper by Harvard's JM candidate Stephanie Hurder "An Integrated Model of Occupation Choice, Spouse Choice, and Family Labor Supply"
Her Abstract reads: "I present an integrated model of occupation choice, spouse choice, family labor supply, and fertility that unifies an extensive empirical literature on career and family and provides predictions on the relationship among career, family, and marriage market outcomes. Two key assumptions of the model are that occupations differ both in wages and in an amenity termed flexibility, and that children require parental time that has no market substitute. Occupations with high costs of flexibility, modeled as a nonlinearity in wages, have a lower fraction of women, less positive assortative mating on earnings, and lower fertility among dual-career couples. Costly flexibility may induce high-earning couples to share home production, which rewards agents who are simultaneously high-earning and productive in child care. Empirical evidence is consistent with two main theoretical predictions: dual-career couples in more flexible occupations are more likely to have children, and professional women who achieve “career and family” in inflexible occupations are more likely to be married to lower-earning husbands or husbands less educated than themselves."
See also Al Roth's post about Stephanie
Last, but definitely not least, is a paper by Marianne Bertrand, Emir Kamenica, and Jessica Pan: "Gender identity and relative income within households" The abstract reads: "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, wife's labor force participation, wife's income conditional on working, satisfaction with the marriage and divorce, and the division of home production. The distribution of the share of the household income earned by the wife suggests that a potential 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 wife earns more than the husband are less satis ed 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."
This paper received some attention for The Economist.
See also Marianne Bertrand's "Career, Family and the Well-Being of College-Educated Women"
and her work with Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz "Dynamics of the Gender Gap for Young Professionals in the Financial and Corporate Sectors" American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2010, 2(3), pp. 228-255
Two papers focus on Asia and the role of highly educated women on the marriage market.
For evidence in Asia, and the role of highly educated women on the market for imported women see Daiji Kawaguchi and Soohyung Lee "Brides for Sale: Cross-Border Marriages and Female Immigration" The abstract reads: "Every year, a large number of women migrate as brides from developing countries to developed countries in East Asia. This phenomenon virtually did not exist in the early 1990s, but foreign brides currently comprise 4 to 35 percent of newlyweds in these developed Asian countries. This paper argues that two factors account for this rapid increase in “bride importation”: the rapid growth of women's educational attainment and a cultural norm that leads to low net surplus of marriage for educated women. We provide empirical evidence supporting our theoretical model and its implications, using datasets from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore."
This effect is the content of the Harvard student Jisoo Hwang's JM paper: "Housewife, "Gold Miss," and Equal: The Evolution of Educated Women's Role in Asia and the U.S. "
Abstract: The fraction of U.S. college graduate women who ever marry has increased relative to less educated women since the mid-1970s. In contrast, college graduate women in developed Asian countries have had decreased rates of marriage, so much so that the term “Gold Misses” has been coined to describe them. This paper argues that the interaction of rapid economic growth in Asia combined with the intergenerational transmission of gender attitudes causes the “Gold Miss” phenomenon. Economic growth has increased the supply of college graduate women, but men’s preference for their wives’ household services has diminished less rapidly and is slowed by women’s role in their mothers’ generation. Using a dynamic model, I show that a large positive wage shock produces a greater mismatch between educated women and men in the marriage market than would gradual wage growth. I test the implications of the model using three data sets: the Japanese General Social Survey, the American Time Use Survey, and the U.S. Census and American Community Survey. Using the Japanese data, I find a positive relationship between a mother’s education (and employment) and her son’s gender attitudes. In the U.S., time spent on household chores among Asian women is inversely related to the female labor force participation rate in husband’s country of origin. Lastly, college graduate Korean and Japanese women in the U.S. have greater options in the marriage market. They are more likely to marry Americans than Korean and Japanese men do, and this gender gap is larger among the foreign born than the U.S. born.
Two paper have tackled the impact of education, demanding jobs, income and marital spouses in the US.
The first is a paper by Harvard's JM candidate Stephanie Hurder "An Integrated Model of Occupation Choice, Spouse Choice, and Family Labor Supply"
Her Abstract reads: "I present an integrated model of occupation choice, spouse choice, family labor supply, and fertility that unifies an extensive empirical literature on career and family and provides predictions on the relationship among career, family, and marriage market outcomes. Two key assumptions of the model are that occupations differ both in wages and in an amenity termed flexibility, and that children require parental time that has no market substitute. Occupations with high costs of flexibility, modeled as a nonlinearity in wages, have a lower fraction of women, less positive assortative mating on earnings, and lower fertility among dual-career couples. Costly flexibility may induce high-earning couples to share home production, which rewards agents who are simultaneously high-earning and productive in child care. Empirical evidence is consistent with two main theoretical predictions: dual-career couples in more flexible occupations are more likely to have children, and professional women who achieve “career and family” in inflexible occupations are more likely to be married to lower-earning husbands or husbands less educated than themselves."
See also Al Roth's post about Stephanie
Last, but definitely not least, is a paper by Marianne Bertrand, Emir Kamenica, and Jessica Pan: "Gender identity and relative income within households" The abstract reads: "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, wife's labor force participation, wife's income conditional on working, satisfaction with the marriage and divorce, and the division of home production. The distribution of the share of the household income earned by the wife suggests that a potential 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 wife earns more than the husband are less satis ed 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."
This paper received some attention for The Economist.
See also Marianne Bertrand's "Career, Family and the Well-Being of College-Educated Women"
and her work with Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz "Dynamics of the Gender Gap for Young Professionals in the Financial and Corporate Sectors" American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2010, 2(3), pp. 228-255
Friday, December 21, 2012
end of the world poem
My friend Gerhard Orosel reminds me of a Viennese version (for those of you who can speak the language) by Jura Soyfer (1912-1939, murdered in Buchenwald) of his first play, Der Weltuntergang oder Die Welt steht auf kein' Fall mehr lang:
Gehn ma halt a bisserl unter,
mit Tschin-tschin in Viererreihn,
immer lustig, fesch und munter,
gar so arg kann's ja net sein.
(aus: Jura Soyfer, Der Weltuntergang, 1936)
In that spirit, cheers to you all...
Gehn ma halt a bisserl unter,
mit Tschin-tschin in Viererreihn,
immer lustig, fesch und munter,
gar so arg kann's ja net sein.
(aus: Jura Soyfer, Der Weltuntergang, 1936)
In that spirit, cheers to you all...
End of the World...
In case any of you are preparing for the end of the world (see here in case you haven't been paying attention; if you want to be prepared, here is a shopping list, lucky for you there is amazon next day delivery...), please make yourself available to those of us who think that maybe we get to keep living and working...
My former student Ned Augenblick has been using a former episode of such beliefs (though luckily more restricted in terms of who believes in it). Turns out that people who like worrying about the end of the world can collect many such opportunities (though of course then you'll always feel that this is the last time...). It would be great if someone could replicate the results of Ned and coauthors.
Ned, together with Jesse Cunha, Ernesto Dal Bo and Justin Rao, "The economics of Faith: Using an Apocalyptic Prophecy to Elicit Religious Beliefs in the Field". The abstract reads
"We model religious faith as a "demand for beliefs," following the logic of the Pascalian wager. We then demonstrate how an experimental intervention can exploit standard elicitation techniques to measure religious belief by varying prizes associated with making choices contrary to one's belief in a, crucially, falsi able religious proposition. We implemented this approach with a group that expected the "End of the World" to happen on May 21, 2011 by o ffering prizes payable before and after May 21st. The results suggest the existence of a demand for extreme, sincere beliefs that was unresponsive to experimental manipulations in price."
Happy Winter Solstice to you all
My former student Ned Augenblick has been using a former episode of such beliefs (though luckily more restricted in terms of who believes in it). Turns out that people who like worrying about the end of the world can collect many such opportunities (though of course then you'll always feel that this is the last time...). It would be great if someone could replicate the results of Ned and coauthors.
Ned, together with Jesse Cunha, Ernesto Dal Bo and Justin Rao, "The economics of Faith: Using an Apocalyptic Prophecy to Elicit Religious Beliefs in the Field". The abstract reads
"We model religious faith as a "demand for beliefs," following the logic of the Pascalian wager. We then demonstrate how an experimental intervention can exploit standard elicitation techniques to measure religious belief by varying prizes associated with making choices contrary to one's belief in a, crucially, falsi able religious proposition. We implemented this approach with a group that expected the "End of the World" to happen on May 21, 2011 by o ffering prizes payable before and after May 21st. The results suggest the existence of a demand for extreme, sincere beliefs that was unresponsive to experimental manipulations in price."
Happy Winter Solstice to you all
Thursday, December 20, 2012
Self-theories: Their role in motivation, personality and development.
My Stanford colleague has a series of interesting work on the effect of different beliefs about intelligence: Do we think it is innate, or can it be changed by hard work? Her main hypothesis is that people who believe that intelligence is innate dread failure because failure is a (negative) signal about one's abilities. On the other hand, people that believe that intelligence can be changed by work do not fear failure as much, they can use failure as an opportunity to learn and grow. The mindset on intelligence will therefore have an impact on whether we seek challenges, and how much stress we feel when exposed to complicated new tasks.
Here's a feature about her work in NY Magazine and a BBC article
A good summary of her work is her book: Dweck, C. S. (1999). Self-theories: Their role in motivation, personality and development. Philadelphia, PA: Taylor and Francis/Psychology
Press.
Here is a recent paper of hers, "Can Everyone Become Highly Intelligent? Cultural Differences in and Societal Consequences of Beliefs About the Universal Potential for Intelligence" by Rattan Aneeta; Savani, Krishna; Naidu N.V.R and Dweck, Carol S. in the November 2012 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
I would be very interested in an experiment showing the correlation between those beliefs and classroom behavior over the long run, controlling for initial grades etc. Something in the style of what me and my coauthors did in "Gender, Competitiveness and Career Choices" (see my former post)
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Experiments on Gender Differences in Negotiation
Gender Differences in Negotiation have been in debate for a long time. There has been lots of work from psychologists, and empirical work by Linda Babcock. However, I always felt that a controlled economic style experiment was missing. Recently, I became aware of two such attempts.
The first is a lab experiment by Mary Rigdon The Role of Social Information on Gender Differences in Negotiation: Her abstract reads: "There is a consensus that there is a gap between male and female wages. This paper investigates whether this is due to a negotiation gap, and what mechanisms can alleviate it, by examining whether females ask for less in a controlled bargaining setting that accurately models relevant
aspects of negotiating over a starting salary. The results are stark: females ask for less, and earn
less than males. Providing social information eliminates the negotiation gap, and more importantly,
the wage gap." She focuses on women asking for less, in a setting where everyone negotiates (one could think of that as the intensive margin)
The second is a paper by Andreas Leibbrandt and John List "Do Women Avoid Salary Negotiations? Evidence from a Large Scale Natural Field Experiment", their abstract reads as: "One explanation advanced for the persistent gender pay differences in labor markets is that women avoid salary negotiations. By using a natural field experiment that randomizes nearly 2,500 job-seekers into jobs that vary important details of the labor contract, we are able to observe both the nature of sorting and the extent of salary negotiations. We observe interesting data patterns. For example, we find that when there is no explicit statement that wages are negotiable, men are more likely to negotiate than women. However, when we explicitly mention the possibility that wages are negotiable, this difference disappears, and even tends to reverse. In terms of sorting, we find that men in contrast to women prefer job environments where the ‘rules of wage determination’ are ambiguous. This leads to the gender gap being much more pronounced in jobs that leave negotiation of wage ambiguous." It seems they focus on the extensive margin of Negotiation.
I want to also mention the very nice paper by Marco Castillo, Ragan Petrie, Maximo Torero and Lise Vesterlund, "Gender Differences in Bargaining Outcomes: A Field Experiment on Discrimination" whose abstract reads "We examine gender differences in bargaining outcomes in a highly competitive and commonly used market; the taxi market in Lima, Peru. We find that men face higher initial prices and rejection rates. To explain the inferior treatment of men we conduct an experiment where passengers send a signal on valuation before negotiating. The signal eliminates gender differences and the response is shown only to be consistent with statistical discrimination. In separating the role of statistical and taste-based discrimination within the market, we address the concern that discrimination may be implicit." One of the nicest field experiments on Discrimination.
The first is a lab experiment by Mary Rigdon The Role of Social Information on Gender Differences in Negotiation: Her abstract reads: "There is a consensus that there is a gap between male and female wages. This paper investigates whether this is due to a negotiation gap, and what mechanisms can alleviate it, by examining whether females ask for less in a controlled bargaining setting that accurately models relevant
aspects of negotiating over a starting salary. The results are stark: females ask for less, and earn
less than males. Providing social information eliminates the negotiation gap, and more importantly,
the wage gap." She focuses on women asking for less, in a setting where everyone negotiates (one could think of that as the intensive margin)
The second is a paper by Andreas Leibbrandt and John List "Do Women Avoid Salary Negotiations? Evidence from a Large Scale Natural Field Experiment", their abstract reads as: "One explanation advanced for the persistent gender pay differences in labor markets is that women avoid salary negotiations. By using a natural field experiment that randomizes nearly 2,500 job-seekers into jobs that vary important details of the labor contract, we are able to observe both the nature of sorting and the extent of salary negotiations. We observe interesting data patterns. For example, we find that when there is no explicit statement that wages are negotiable, men are more likely to negotiate than women. However, when we explicitly mention the possibility that wages are negotiable, this difference disappears, and even tends to reverse. In terms of sorting, we find that men in contrast to women prefer job environments where the ‘rules of wage determination’ are ambiguous. This leads to the gender gap being much more pronounced in jobs that leave negotiation of wage ambiguous." It seems they focus on the extensive margin of Negotiation.
I want to also mention the very nice paper by Marco Castillo, Ragan Petrie, Maximo Torero and Lise Vesterlund, "Gender Differences in Bargaining Outcomes: A Field Experiment on Discrimination" whose abstract reads "We examine gender differences in bargaining outcomes in a highly competitive and commonly used market; the taxi market in Lima, Peru. We find that men face higher initial prices and rejection rates. To explain the inferior treatment of men we conduct an experiment where passengers send a signal on valuation before negotiating. The signal eliminates gender differences and the response is shown only to be consistent with statistical discrimination. In separating the role of statistical and taste-based discrimination within the market, we address the concern that discrimination may be implicit." One of the nicest field experiments on Discrimination.
Monday, December 17, 2012
Nobel Ceremony
Al and Alfred
Me and my nobel colleague and advisor in disguise...
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Liar liar! The neuroscience of sex differences in deception
Here is an interesting post on sex differences and lying, by what appears to be a new psychology blog...
Competitiveness and Career Choices
The first economic experimental paper on gender differences in competitiveness is nearing its 10 year anniversary: "Performance in Competitive Environments: Gender Differences" by Uri Gneezy, Muriel Niederle and Aldo Rustichini. With Lise Vesterlund I then published a paper where we do not assess the intensive margin but rather the extensive margin of gender differences in competitiveness "Do Women Shy away from Competition? Do Men Compete too Much?".
I was fortunate that this work received a lot of attention and generated a whole literature (for an overview see Niederle, Muriel and Lise Vesterlund, “Gender and Competition”). We also received a lot of citations from labor economists mentioning that gender differences in psychological attributes, such as competitiveness, may be a reason for the gender gap in education and labor market outcomes.
However, there has been no satisfactory direct evidence linking gender differences in psychological attributes such as competitiveness to education and labor market outcomes. That is we have no good evidence on the external relevance of competitiveness. This is what Buser, Thomas, Muriel Niederle and Hessel Oosterbeek, “Gender, Competitiveness and Career Choices,” does: We examine how competitiveness is associated with education. The abstract reads:
"Gender differences in competitiveness are often discussed as a potential explanation for gender differences in education and labor market outcomes. We correlate an incentivized measure of competitiveness with an important career choice of secondary school students in the Netherlands. At the age of 15, these students have to pick one out of four study profiles, which vary in how prestigious they are. While boys and girls have very similar levels of academic ability, boys are substantially more likely than girls to choose more prestigious profiles. We find that competitiveness is as important a predictor of profile choice as gender. More importantly, up to 23 percent of the gender difference in profile choice can be attributed to gender differences in competitiveness. This lends support to the extrapolation of laboratory findings on competitiveness to labor market settings."
More work is needed to make sure these findings are robust.
Stay tuned for more on gender differences and also for more on lab to field papers.
However, there has been no satisfactory direct evidence linking gender differences in psychological attributes such as competitiveness to education and labor market outcomes. That is we have no good evidence on the external relevance of competitiveness. This is what Buser, Thomas, Muriel Niederle and Hessel Oosterbeek, “Gender, Competitiveness and Career Choices,” does: We examine how competitiveness is associated with education. The abstract reads:
"Gender differences in competitiveness are often discussed as a potential explanation for gender differences in education and labor market outcomes. We correlate an incentivized measure of competitiveness with an important career choice of secondary school students in the Netherlands. At the age of 15, these students have to pick one out of four study profiles, which vary in how prestigious they are. While boys and girls have very similar levels of academic ability, boys are substantially more likely than girls to choose more prestigious profiles. We find that competitiveness is as important a predictor of profile choice as gender. More importantly, up to 23 percent of the gender difference in profile choice can be attributed to gender differences in competitiveness. This lends support to the extrapolation of laboratory findings on competitiveness to labor market settings."
More work is needed to make sure these findings are robust.
Stay tuned for more on gender differences and also for more on lab to field papers.
Saturday, December 15, 2012
Nobel Gear
Turns out being invited to the Nobel Ceremony and Dinner isn't such an innocuous invitation as it may sound: One needs proper clothes to meet the Swedish King. Here's me, trying my best, still in Vienna, though.
I expect Al to look something like that (though maybe with a little more grey hair, meeting all those grad students and former students seems to have taken a toll...:) Note, however, that men have it much easier, they just send in their measurements, and, presto, white tie and tails and shoes appear...
On the morning of October 15, the day of the announcement, I jumped into my car to give Al a well deserved congratulations. Turns out I was not the only visitor at his house at 6:15 am, his living room looked like a news room! Here's a nice picture taken by Linda Cicero for Stanford
and check out the following Video...
Stay tuned for more pictures of this event!
I expect Al to look something like that (though maybe with a little more grey hair, meeting all those grad students and former students seems to have taken a toll...:) Note, however, that men have it much easier, they just send in their measurements, and, presto, white tie and tails and shoes appear...
On the morning of October 15, the day of the announcement, I jumped into my car to give Al a well deserved congratulations. Turns out I was not the only visitor at his house at 6:15 am, his living room looked like a news room! Here's a nice picture taken by Linda Cicero for Stanford
Fast and Behavioral vs Slow and "Rational"
There have been two papers that seem to lead to the conclusion that making decisions quickly leads to a large influence of "behavioral" behavior: More rejection of unfair offers in ultimatum games and more donations in public good games, than when subjects are forced to take time to make a decision. However the first paper seems to suggest that the result may be a little fragile in that a "pre-choice" may eliminate the impact of a delayed decision, in this case, a delayed possibility to revise choices.
For the Ultimatum Game see: Veronika Grimm and Friederike Mengel, "Let me sleep on it: Delay reduces rejection rates in ultimatum games" Economics Letters, Volume 111, Issue 2, May 2011, Pages 113–115.
The Abstract reads: "Delaying acceptance decisions in the Ultimatum Game drastically increases acceptance of low offers. While in treatments without delay less than 20% of low offers are accepted, 60–80% are accepted as we delay the acceptance decision by around 10 min."
For the Public Good Game see: David G. Rand, Joshua D. Greene & Martin A. Nowak: "Spontaneous giving and calculated greed" Nature 489, 427–430 (20 September 2012).
The abstract reads:
"Cooperation is central to human social behaviour. However, choosing to cooperate requires individuals to incur a personal cost to benefit others. Here we explore the cognitive basis of cooperative decision-making in humans using a dual-process framework. We ask whether people are predisposed towards selfishness, behaving cooperatively only through active self-control; or whether they are intuitively cooperative, with reflection and prospective reasoning favouring ‘rational’ self-interest. To investigate this issue, we perform ten studies using economic games. We find that across a range of experimental designs, subjects who reach their decisions more quickly are more cooperative. Furthermore, forcing subjects to decide quickly increases contributions, whereas instructing them to reflect and forcing them to decide slowly decreases contributions. Finally, an induction that primes subjects to trust their intuitions increases contributions compared with an induction that promotes greater reflection. To explain these results, we propose that cooperation is intuitive because cooperative heuristics are developed in daily life where cooperation is typically advantageous. We then validate predictions generated by this proposed mechanism. Our results provide convergent evidence that intuition supports cooperation in social dilemmas, and that reflection can undermine these cooperative impulses."
I think there is room for more understanding on that issue, how it would work for other biases, and whether the findings so far are robust. It may also be nice to combine this with an environment where this tendency can be exploited... Please let me know if you're aware of other papers on that issue.
For the Ultimatum Game see: Veronika Grimm and Friederike Mengel, "Let me sleep on it: Delay reduces rejection rates in ultimatum games" Economics Letters, Volume 111, Issue 2, May 2011, Pages 113–115.
The Abstract reads: "Delaying acceptance decisions in the Ultimatum Game drastically increases acceptance of low offers. While in treatments without delay less than 20% of low offers are accepted, 60–80% are accepted as we delay the acceptance decision by around 10 min."
For the Public Good Game see: David G. Rand, Joshua D. Greene & Martin A. Nowak: "Spontaneous giving and calculated greed" Nature 489, 427–430 (20 September 2012).
The abstract reads:
"Cooperation is central to human social behaviour. However, choosing to cooperate requires individuals to incur a personal cost to benefit others. Here we explore the cognitive basis of cooperative decision-making in humans using a dual-process framework. We ask whether people are predisposed towards selfishness, behaving cooperatively only through active self-control; or whether they are intuitively cooperative, with reflection and prospective reasoning favouring ‘rational’ self-interest. To investigate this issue, we perform ten studies using economic games. We find that across a range of experimental designs, subjects who reach their decisions more quickly are more cooperative. Furthermore, forcing subjects to decide quickly increases contributions, whereas instructing them to reflect and forcing them to decide slowly decreases contributions. Finally, an induction that primes subjects to trust their intuitions increases contributions compared with an induction that promotes greater reflection. To explain these results, we propose that cooperation is intuitive because cooperative heuristics are developed in daily life where cooperation is typically advantageous. We then validate predictions generated by this proposed mechanism. Our results provide convergent evidence that intuition supports cooperation in social dilemmas, and that reflection can undermine these cooperative impulses."
I think there is room for more understanding on that issue, how it would work for other biases, and whether the findings so far are robust. It may also be nice to combine this with an environment where this tendency can be exploited... Please let me know if you're aware of other papers on that issue.
Friday, December 14, 2012
Experimental Economics Coming of Age
Experimental Economics is coming of age... It is now the third time that experimental economics was mentioned in the main write-up of the Nobel Prize as work done by the Nobel recipient, integral to work for which the Nobel prize was awarded.
The first time was in 2002 when Daniel Kahneman and Vernon Smith received it for "Foundations of Behavioral and Experimental Economics", where, obviously, experimental and behavioral economics played a major role.
The second time was in 2009 when Elinor Ostrom and Oliver E. Williamson shared the prize for "Economic Governance".
Third time is the charm: This year, 2012, Experimental Economics was prominently featured in the write up of the Nobel prize for Alvin Roth (very proud of my adviser:) and Lloyd Shapley.
What is remarkable is that Al didn't win the prize for his work in Experimental Economics but for his work on Market Design. Experiments are just an integral part of that work, an additional method to learn about those markets, next to theory, empirical work and simulations... The success of experiments is that they're now "infiltrating" "standard" economics.
Here's the part where experiments are mentioned (they also mentions under the headline "other contributions of Al Roth" some of his experiments on bargaining and learning).
"4.3 Experimental evidence
The empirical evidence seems to support the hypothesis that stable matching algorithms can prevent market failure (Roth and Xing, 1994, Roth, 2002, Niederle, Roth, and Sönmez, 2008). However, many conditions in‡uence the success or failure of market institutions. The objective of market designers is to isolate the role of the mechanism itself, and compare the performance of different mechanisms under the same conditions. But this is difficult to accomplish in the real world. For example, British regional medical markets might differ in numerous ways that cannot be controlled by an economist. Accordingly, market designers have turned to controlled laboratory experiments to evaluate and compare the performance of mechanisms.
Kagel and Roth (2000) compared the stable (deferred-acceptance) algorithm used in Edinburgh and Cardiff with the unstable “priority-matching” algorithm used in Newcastle. In their experiment, a centralized matching mechanism was made available to the subjects, but they could choose to match in a decentralized way, without using the mechanism. When the mechanism used priority matching, the experimental market tended to unravel, and many matches were made outside the mechanism. The deferred-acceptance mechanism did not suffer from the same kind of unraveling. This provided experimental evidence in favor of Roth’s hypothesis that the matching algorithm itself and, in particular, its stability, contribute importantly to the functioning of the market.
Two regions, Cambridge and London Hospital, presented an anomaly for Roth’s hypothesis. In these regions, the matching algorithms solved a linear programming problem which did not produce stable outcomes. Yet, these markets did not appear to unravel, and the unstable mechanisms remained
in use (see Table 1). In experiments, the linear programming mechanisms seem to perform no better than priority matching, which suggests that conditions specific to Cambridge and London Hospital, rather than the intrinsic properties of their matching algorithms, may have prevented unraveling there (Ünver, 2005). Roth (1991a) argued that these markets are in fact so small that social pressures may prevent unraveling.
In one U.S. medical labor market (for gastroenterology), a stable algorithm was abandoned after a shock to the demand and supply of positions. McKinney, Niederle and Roth’'s (2005) laboratory experiments suggested that this market failed mainly because, while employers knew about the exogenous shock, the applicants did not. Shocks that both sides of the market knew about did not seem to cause the same problems. This suggested that the algorithm would fail only under very special conditions. Roth and M. Niederle helped the American Gastroenterology Association reintroduce a deferred-acceptance matching algorithm in 2006. Niederle, Proctor and Roth (2008) describe early evidence in favor of the reintroduced matching mechanism." For the full write up see "Stable Allocations and the practice of Market Design"
Experimental Economics received "honorable mentions" as the work done by a Nobel recipient in the 2005 Nobel prize of Robert J. Aumann and Thomas C. Schelling "Contributions to Game Theory: Analyses of Conflict and Cooperation" and in the 1994 prize of John C. Harsanyi, John F. Nash Jr. and Reinhard Selten "for their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games".
Experimental Economics (as in laboratory experiments) received some mention as evidence of other economists in the 2001 prize of George A. Akerlof, A. Michael Spence and Joseph E. Stiglitz "Markets with Asymmetric Information".
The first time was in 2002 when Daniel Kahneman and Vernon Smith received it for "Foundations of Behavioral and Experimental Economics", where, obviously, experimental and behavioral economics played a major role.
The second time was in 2009 when Elinor Ostrom and Oliver E. Williamson shared the prize for "Economic Governance".
Third time is the charm: This year, 2012, Experimental Economics was prominently featured in the write up of the Nobel prize for Alvin Roth (very proud of my adviser:) and Lloyd Shapley.
What is remarkable is that Al didn't win the prize for his work in Experimental Economics but for his work on Market Design. Experiments are just an integral part of that work, an additional method to learn about those markets, next to theory, empirical work and simulations... The success of experiments is that they're now "infiltrating" "standard" economics.
Here's the part where experiments are mentioned (they also mentions under the headline "other contributions of Al Roth" some of his experiments on bargaining and learning).
"4.3 Experimental evidence
The empirical evidence seems to support the hypothesis that stable matching algorithms can prevent market failure (Roth and Xing, 1994, Roth, 2002, Niederle, Roth, and Sönmez, 2008). However, many conditions in‡uence the success or failure of market institutions. The objective of market designers is to isolate the role of the mechanism itself, and compare the performance of different mechanisms under the same conditions. But this is difficult to accomplish in the real world. For example, British regional medical markets might differ in numerous ways that cannot be controlled by an economist. Accordingly, market designers have turned to controlled laboratory experiments to evaluate and compare the performance of mechanisms.
Kagel and Roth (2000) compared the stable (deferred-acceptance) algorithm used in Edinburgh and Cardiff with the unstable “priority-matching” algorithm used in Newcastle. In their experiment, a centralized matching mechanism was made available to the subjects, but they could choose to match in a decentralized way, without using the mechanism. When the mechanism used priority matching, the experimental market tended to unravel, and many matches were made outside the mechanism. The deferred-acceptance mechanism did not suffer from the same kind of unraveling. This provided experimental evidence in favor of Roth’s hypothesis that the matching algorithm itself and, in particular, its stability, contribute importantly to the functioning of the market.
Two regions, Cambridge and London Hospital, presented an anomaly for Roth’s hypothesis. In these regions, the matching algorithms solved a linear programming problem which did not produce stable outcomes. Yet, these markets did not appear to unravel, and the unstable mechanisms remained
in use (see Table 1). In experiments, the linear programming mechanisms seem to perform no better than priority matching, which suggests that conditions specific to Cambridge and London Hospital, rather than the intrinsic properties of their matching algorithms, may have prevented unraveling there (Ünver, 2005). Roth (1991a) argued that these markets are in fact so small that social pressures may prevent unraveling.
In one U.S. medical labor market (for gastroenterology), a stable algorithm was abandoned after a shock to the demand and supply of positions. McKinney, Niederle and Roth’'s (2005) laboratory experiments suggested that this market failed mainly because, while employers knew about the exogenous shock, the applicants did not. Shocks that both sides of the market knew about did not seem to cause the same problems. This suggested that the algorithm would fail only under very special conditions. Roth and M. Niederle helped the American Gastroenterology Association reintroduce a deferred-acceptance matching algorithm in 2006. Niederle, Proctor and Roth (2008) describe early evidence in favor of the reintroduced matching mechanism." For the full write up see "Stable Allocations and the practice of Market Design"
Experimental Economics received "honorable mentions" as the work done by a Nobel recipient in the 2005 Nobel prize of Robert J. Aumann and Thomas C. Schelling "Contributions to Game Theory: Analyses of Conflict and Cooperation" and in the 1994 prize of John C. Harsanyi, John F. Nash Jr. and Reinhard Selten "for their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games".
Experimental Economics (as in laboratory experiments) received some mention as evidence of other economists in the 2001 prize of George A. Akerlof, A. Michael Spence and Joseph E. Stiglitz "Markets with Asymmetric Information".
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