Knowledge that Transforms

We model team formation as a random matching process influenced by agents’ preferences for team size and gender composition. We then test if the coauthorship pattern in articles published during 1991–2002 in three top economics journals is gender neutral, exploiting variation in female presence across subfields. Controlling for author, team, and field characteristics, we find that the gender gap in the propensity to coauthor with a woman increases in the presence of women in the subfield. We also find that women single author significantly more than men. These findings allow us to reject gender neutrality in team formation in economics.

Little is known about the mechanisms underlying the transfer of economic status between generations. This paper addresses the question of whether inter-generational correlations in health contribute to the perpetuation of economic status. We examine inter-generational correlations in birth weight, a key indicator of the health of newborns that we link to future educational attainment and earnings using a unique data set based on California births from 1960s to the present. We use names and birth dates to link the records of mothers and children. We also identify mothers who are siblings. We show that there is a strong intergenerational correlation in the birth weight of mothers and children, but that a measure of household income at the time of the mother's birth is also predictive of low birth weight and that there is an interaction between maternal low birth weight and poverty in the production of low birth weight. Together these findings suggest that intergenerational correlations in health could play a role in the intergenerational transmission of income. Parent's income affects child health, and health at birth affects future income.

Recent evidence suggests that employers acquire more precise information about a worker’s productivity the more time he or she spends in the labor market. The following question arises: Is learning symmetric, that is, do all employers have the same information about workers’ productivity, or is learning asymmetric, that is, does the current employer have superior information about workers’ productivity? This article develops a learning model with endogenous mobility that nests both learning hypotheses. It then proposes new tests for asymmetric employer learning. Overall, learning appears to be mostly symmetric, except possibly when the employees involved are college graduates.

This article considers how divorce law alters the incentives for couples to invest in their marriage, focusing on the impact of unilateral divorce laws on investments in new marriages. Differences across states between 1970 and 1980 provide useful quasi‐experimental variation with which to consider incentives to invest in several types of marriage‐specific capital: spouse’s education, children, household specialization, and home ownership. I find that adoption of unilateral divorce—regardless of the prevailing property‐division laws—reduces investment in all types of marriage‐specific capital considered except home ownership. In contrast, results for home ownership depend on the underlying property division laws.