Knowledge that Transforms

I investigate the link between access to the contraceptive pill, mental health, education, and labor market outcomes. Liberalizing education and labor market effects of access to the pill via its fertility control function are well established. More recently, however, a medical literature suggests a link between hormonal contraception and depression. Exploiting variation in access to the pill, I document substantial mental health effects of the pill. These mental health effects are driven by individuals with a genetic predisposition for depression who then do not experience the positive effects on education and labor market outcomes.

Domestic outsourcing has grown substantially in developed countries over the past two decades. This paper addresses the question of the technological drivers of this phenomenon by studying the impact of the staggered diffusion of broadband internet in France during the 2000s. Our results confirm that broadband technology increases firm productivity and the relative demand for high-skill workers. Further, we show that broadband internet led firms to outsource some non-core occupations to service contractors, both in the low and high-skill segments. In both cases, we find that employment related to these occupations became increasingly concentrated in firms specializing in these activities, and was less likely to be performed in-house within firms specialized in other activities. As a result, after the arrival of broadband internet, establishments become increasingly homogeneous in their occupational composition. Finally, we provide suggestive evidence that high-skill workers experience salary gains from being outsourced, while low-skill workers lose out.

We compare evaluations of employee performance by individuals and groups of supervisors, analyzing a formal model and running a laboratory experiment. The model predicts that multirater evaluations are more precise than single-rater evaluations if groups rationally aggregate their signals about employee performance. Our controlled laboratory experiment confirms this prediction and finds evidence that this can indeed be attributed to accurate information processing in the group. Moreover, when employee compensation depends on evaluations, multirater evaluations tend to be associated with higher performance.

We present a natural field experiment on promoting pay equity through simple modifications to the salary review process involving 623 middle managers and 8,951 subordinate employees of a large technology firm. We first document a gender gap not only in salary levels but also in salary increases. Our treatments provide for a gender-blind reallocation of the salary increase budget available to middle managers aimed at promoting pay equity, along with different variants of a corresponding decision guidance. We show that the budget reallocation combined with an explicit decision guidance, while still leaving middle managers discretion in allocating the budget, can completely eliminate the gender gap in salary increases. The treatments also do not appear to undermine the desired performance differentiation in salary increases. We thus show that simple modifications to the salary review process can go a long way toward achieving pay equity by preventing gender gaps from widening throughout employees' careers.

We develop and estimate an equilibrium model with heterogeneous local markets, households, and firms, highlighting the interrelationship between various components of the health insurance system—employer-sponsored health insurance (ESHI), individual health insurance (HIX), and Medicaid—and their relationship with the labor market. We estimate the model exploiting variation across states and before and after the Affordable Care Act. We consider counterfactual policies that cross subsidize between ESHI and HIX, including pure ESHI-HIX risk pooling as a special case. We find that such policies would increase household welfare and output and decrease government expenditure and would be more effective with Medicaid expansion.

This paper studies gender difference in innovation recognition using patent citations. We propose a method to quantify under-citation based on pairwise textual similarity of patents. Both male and female inventors exhibit homophily, under-citing patents by inventors of the opposite gender, and this tendency is stronger among female inventors than male inventors. However, female inventors' patents are 12% less likely to be cited overall because female inventors are outnumbered by male inventors (i.e., composition effect dominates). By contrast, citations added by patent examiners show little gender difference. Past under-citations negatively impact future patenting activities, more so for female inventors.

I investigate the mechanisms that drive sorting into entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial success among young individuals. I use Canadian matched owner-employeremployee data to conduct my investigation. Empirically, older entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs who have previously worked in high-wage firms tend to do better. To explain these findings, I develop a dynamic Roy model of career choice that features heterogeneous employers, human capital accumulation, and unobserved heterogeneity across individuals. Among other things, I find that prior work experience is particularly valuable for "subsistence" entrepreneurs. I use the estimated model to evaluate policies designed to promote entrepreneurship.