Women earn better grades than men across levels of education—but to what end? This article assesses whether men and women receive equal returns to academic performance in hiring. I conducted an audit ...study by submitting 2,106 job applications that experimentally manipulated applicants’ GPA, gender, and college major. Although GPA matters little for men, women benefit from moderate achievement but not high achievement. As a result, highachieving men are called back significantly more often than high-achieving women—at a rate of nearly 2-to-1. I further find that high-achieving women are most readily penalized when they major in math: high-achieving men math majors are called back three times as often as their women counterparts. A survey experiment conducted with 261 hiring decisionmakers suggests that these patterns are due to employers’ gendered standards for applicants. Employers value competence and commitment among men applicants, but instead privilege women applicants who are perceived as likeable. This standard helps moderate-achieving women, who are often described as sociable and outgoing, but hurts high-achieving women, whose personalities are viewed with more skepticism. These findings suggest that achievement invokes gendered stereotypes that penalize women for having good grades, creating unequal returns to academic performance at labor market entry.
We use administrative records on the incomes of more than 40 million children and their parents to describe three features of intergenerational mobility in the United States. First, we characterize ...the joint distribution of parent and child income at the national level. The conditional expectation of child income given parent income is linear in percentile ranks. On average, a 10 percentile increase in parent income is associated with a 3.4 percentile increase in a child’s income. Second, intergenerational mobility varies substantially across areas within the United States. For example, the probability that a child reaches the top quintile of the national income distribution starting from a family in the bottom quintile is 4.4% in Charlotte but 12.9% in San Jose. Third, we explore the factors correlated with upward mobility. High mobility areas have (i) less residential segregation, (ii) less income inequality, (iii) better primary schools, (iv) greater social capital, and (v) greater family stability. Although our descriptive analysis does not identify the causal mechanisms that determine upward mobility, the publicly available statistics on intergenerational mobility developed here can facilitate research on such mechanisms.
My focus is on the degree to which increasing inequality in the high-income countries, particularly in the United States, is likely to limit economic mobility for the next generation of young adults. ...I discuss the underlying drivers of opportunity that generate the relationship between inequality and intergenerational mobility. The goal is to explain why America differs from other countries, how intergenerational mobility will change in an era of higher inequality, and how the process is different for the top 1 percent. I begin by presenting evidence that countries with more inequality at one point in time also experience less earnings mobility across the generations, a relationship that has been called “The Great Gatsby Curve.” The interaction between families, labor markets, and public policies all structure a child's opportunities and determine the extent to which adult earnings are related to family background—but they do so in different ways across national contexts. Both cross-country comparisons and the underlying trends suggest that these drivers are all configured most likely to lower, or at least not raise, the degree of intergenerational earnings mobility for the next generation of Americans coming of age in a more polarized labor market. This trend will likely continue unless there are changes in public policy that promote the human capital of children in a way that offers relatively greater benefits to the relatively disadvantaged.
Recent research has begun to distinguish two aspects of subjective well-being. Emotional well-being refers to the emotional quality of an individual's everyday experience—the frequency and intensity ...of experiences of joy, stress, sadness, anger, and affection that make one's life pleasant or unpleasant. Life evaluation refers to the thoughts that people have about their life when they think about it. We raise the question of whether money buys happiness, separately for these two aspects of well-being. We report an analysis of more than 450,000 responses to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, a daily survey of 1,000 US residents conducted by the Gallup Organization. We find that emotional well-being (measured by questions about emotional experiences yesterday) and life evaluation (measured by Cantril's Self-Anchoring Scale) have different correlates. Income and education are more closely related to life evaluation, but health, care giving, loneliness, and smoking are relatively stronger predictors of daily emotions. When plotted against log income, life evaluation rises steadily. Emotional well-being also rises with log income, but there is no further progress beyond an annual income of ∼$75,000. Low income exacerbates the emotional pain associated with such misfortunes as divorce, ill health, and being alone. We conclude that high income buys life satisfaction but not happiness, and that low income is associated both with low life evaluation and low emotional well-being.
Human capital and regional development Gennaioli, Nicola; La Porta, Rafael; Lopez-de-Silanes, Florencio ...
The Quarterly journal of economics,
02/2013, Volume:
128, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
We investigate the determinants of regional development using a newly constructed database of 1,569 subnational regions from 110 countries covering 74% of the world’s surface and 97% of its GDP. We ...combine the cross-regional analysis of geographic, institutional, cultural, and human capital determinants of regional development with an examination of productivity in several thousand establishments located in these regions. To organize the discussion, we present a new model of regional development that introduces into a standard migration framework elements of both the Lucas (1978) model of the allocation of talent between entrepreneurship and work, and the Lucas (1988) model of human capital externalities. The evidence points to the paramount importance of human capital in accounting for regional differences in development, but also suggests from model estimation and calibration that entrepreneurial inputs and possibly human capital externalities help understand the data.
The career costs of children Adda, Jérôme; Dustmann, Christian; Stevens, Katrien
Journal of political economy,
04/2017, Volume:
125, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
We estimate a dynamic life cycle model of labor supply, fertility, and savings, incorporating occupational choices, with specific wage paths and skill atrophy that vary over the career. This allows ...us to understand the trade-off between occupational choice and desired fertility, as well as sorting both into the labor market and across occupations. We quantify the life cycle career costs associated with children, how they decompose into loss of skills during interruptions, lost earnings opportunities, and selection into more child-friendly occupations. We analyze the long-run effects of policies that encourage fertility and show that they are considerably smaller than short-run effects.
"Although sources and determinants of academic entrepreneurship have begun to command the attention of policy-makers and researchers, there remain many unanswered questions about how individual and ...social factors shape the decisions of academics to engage in entrepreneurial activities. Using a large-scale panel of academics from a variety of UK universities from 2001 to 2009, this paper examines how an academics' level of entrepreneurial capacity in terms of opportunity recognition capacity, and their prior entrepreneurial experience shape the likelihood of them being involved in starting up a new venture. In addition, we explore what role university Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs) play in stimulating venture creation. The results show that individual-level attributes and experience are the most important predictors of academic entrepreneurship. We also find that the social environment surrounding the academic also plays an influential role, but its role is much less pronounced than individual-level factors. Finally, we show that the activities of the TTO play only a marginal, indirect role, in driving academics to start new ventures. We explore the implications of this analysis for policy and organizational design for academic entrepreneurship." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku). Die Untersuchung enthält quantitative Daten. Forschungsmethode: empirisch-quantitativ; empirisch; Längsschnitt. Die Untersuchung bezieht sich auf den Zeitraum 2001 bis 2009.
Hiring as cultural matching Rivera, Lauren A
American sociological review,
12/2012, Volume:
77, Issue:
6
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This article presents culture as a vehicle of labor market sorting. Providing a case study of hiring in elite professional service firms, I investigate the often suggested but heretofore empirically ...unexamined hypothesis that cultural similarities between employers and job candidates matter for employers' hiring decisions. Drawing from 120 interviews with employers as well as participant observation of a hiring committee, I argue that hiring is more than just a process of skills sorting; it is also a process of cultural matching between candidates, evaluators, and firms. Employers sought candidates who were not only competent but also culturally similar to themselves in terms of leisure pursuits, experiences, and self-presentation styles. Concerns about shared culture were highly salient to employers and often outweighed concerns about absolute productivity. I unpack the interpersonal processes through which cultural similarities affected candidate evaluation in elite firms and provide the first empirical demonstration that shared culture—particularly in the form of lifestyle markers—matters for employer hiring. I conclude by discussing the implications for scholarship on culture, inequality, and labor markets.
Why are some individuals more likely to become owners of small businesses than others? We classify industries using measures of entry barriers and proceed to investigate how determinants of entry ...vary in high- as opposed to low-barrier fields. Claims that neither financial-capital constraints nor the educational backgrounds of aspiring small-business owners predict the likelihood of small-business entry are investigated in this context. These claims of irrelevance, we find, are inconsistent with the facts. The wealth and educational background characteristics potential entrepreneurs possess predispose them to make distinctly different industry choices, both because of the differing rewards available to them and the very different entry barriers they face. The characteristics of potential entrants, in other words, draw them toward some industries and away from others.
► Traits of potential entrepreneurs draw them toward some types of new ventures and away from others. ► High personal wealth sometimes predicts entrepreneurial entry and sometimes it doesn't. ► The college graduate trait negatively predicts entry into many lines of small business.
We used psychological contract theory as a framework to meta-analytically review subjective and objective predictors of employees' perceived job insecurity. Seventy-six samples from 68 studies were ...included in our review. Results revealed that lower levels of job insecurity are associated with having an internal locus of control, lower amounts of role ambiguity and role conflict, greater amounts of organizational communication, less organizational change, younger employees, and white-collar and permanent work. Moderator analyses further revealed that relations between job insecurity and age, gender, education, and formal contracts are moderated by unemployment rates, countries of origin, and type of job insecurity measure. We discuss theoretical and practical implications for psychological contract theory and occupational health, and offer directions for future research.
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