This paper provides evidence from a negotiation experiment that the 2016 US presidential election of Donald Trump had a profound impact on individual behavior in the lab. Using a Battle of the Sexes ...game with unstructured communication, we find that post-election individuals are less cooperative in general, more likely to use adversarial negotiation strategies, and less likely to reach an agreement. Furthermore, this is particularly driven by men acting more aggressively toward women. Our results are robust to controlling for sample selection. These results suggest that Trump's election may have disrupted community norms around civility and chivalry.
Incentivized Resume Rating Kessler, Judd B.; Low, Corinne; Sullivan, Colin D.
The American economic review,
11/2019, Letnik:
109, Številka:
11
Journal Article
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We introduce a new experimental paradigm to evaluate employer preferences, called incentivized resume rating (IRR). Employers evaluate resumes they know to be hypothetical in order to be matched with ...real job seekers, preserving incentives while avoiding the deception necessary in audit studies. We deploy IRR with employers recruiting college seniors from a prestigious school, randomizing human capital characteristics and demographics of hypothetical candidates. We measure both employer preferences for candidates and employer beliefs about the likelihood that candidates will accept job offers, avoiding a typical confound in audit studies. We discuss the costs, benefits, and future applications of this new methodology.
Throughout the twentieth century, the relationship between women’s human capital and men’s income was nonmonotonic: while college-educated women married richer spouses than high school–educated ...women, graduate-educated women married poorer spouses than college-educated women. This can be rationalized by a bidimensional matching framework where women’s human capital is negatively correlated with another valuable trait: fertility, or reproductive capital. Such a model predicts nonmonotonicity in income matching with a sufficiently high income distribution of men. A simulation of the model using US Census fertility and income data shows that it can also predict the recent transition to more assortative matching as desired family sizes have fallen.
This paper quantifies the causal negative impact of age on women’s marriage market appeal using an experiment where real online daters rate hypothetical profiles with randomly assigned ages. ...Truthfulness is incentivized through the experiment’s compensation: participants receive professional dating advice customized according to their ratings. The experiment shows that for every year a woman ages, she must earn $7,000 more annually to remain equally attractive to potential partners. This preference appears driven by women’s asymmetric fertility decline with age, as it is present only for men without children and who have accurate knowledge of the age-fertility trade-off.
Women’s time-limited fertility window, compared to men’s longer period of fecundity, could be a key constraint in shaping the gender gap in career choices and hence outcomes. Israel’s 1994 policy ...change that made in-vitro fertilization free provides a natural experiment for examining how fertility time horizons impact women’s investment choices. We find that following the policy change women complete more college and graduate education. We then present evidence suggesting that these larger investments contributed to better labor market outcomes, reducing the gender gap in career achievement. This further implies that persistent labor market inequality may be partly rooted in biological asymmetries.
Conventional wisdom holds that women are worse negotiators than men. However, in an incentivized negotiation with explicit verbal communication, we find that women perform equally well compared to ...men, contrary to a control game without communication where men perform better. This is driven by men’s underperformance against male partners, and more specifically when they know their partner is male. Using chat transcripts to classify the negotiation approaches used, we show that men over-use aggressive negotiation strategies against known male partners, increasing mis-match and reducing their payoffs. Due to this, male-male pairs capture significantly less value than any other pair type. In contrast, female negotiators create joint gains without reducing their individual payoffs. Our findings suggest that verbal communication may trigger “toxic masculinity” that undoes men’s advantage in one-shot non-communication games.
Collateralized Marriage Lafortune, Jeanne; Low, Corinne
American economic journal. Applied economics,
10/2023, Letnik:
15, Številka:
4
Journal Article
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Marriage rates have become increasingly stratified by homeownership. We investigate this in a household model where investments in public goods reduce future earnings and, thus, divorce risk creates ...inefficiencies. Access to a joint savings technology, like a house, collateralizes marriage, providing insurance to the lower-earning partner and increasing specialization, public goods, and value from marriage. We use idiosyncratic variation in housing prices to show that homeownership access indeed leads to greater specialization. The model also predicts that policies that erode the marriage contract in other ways will make wealth a more important determinant of marriage, which we confirm empirically. (JEL D12, D86, G51, H41, J12, R31)
Israel’s 1994 adoption of free in vitro fertilization (IVF) provides a natural experiment for how fertility time horizons impact women’s marriage timing and other outcomes. We find a substantial ...increase in average age at first marriage following the policy change, using both men and Arab-Israeli women as comparison groups. This shift appears to be driven by both increased marriages by older women and younger women delaying marriage. Age at first birth also increased. Placebo and robustness checks help pinpoint IVF as the source of the change. Our findings suggest age-limited fertility materially impacts women’s life timing and outcomes relative to men.
What explains the growing gap in marriage rates between socioeconomic groups? We present a robust stylized fact not previously documented: marriage rates are higher for individuals with more assets. ...We argue this may be driven by marriage and cohabitation becoming increasingly similar in a number of ways except for the way assets become marital property to be divided upon divorce in marriage while they remain individual property in the case of cohabitation. We propose that ownership of assets may provide “insurance” to the partner making individually costly, but jointly optimal, investments in children, thus raising the value of marriage.
Abstract We document a new way that discrimination operates: through sequential spillover effects. Employers in an incentivized resume rating experiment evaluate a sequence of hypothetical candidates ...with randomly assigned characteristics. Candidates are rated worse when following white men than when following women or minorities. Exploring the mechanisms, we find that spillover effects are inversely related to direct bias. When reviewing high-quality resumes or recruiting in STEM industries, employers directly favor white men and display no spillover effect. For low-quality resumes or non-STEM industries, we find no direct bias but a strong spillover effect. Results suggest that discrimination arises in subtle ways.
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