Knowledge that Transforms

Society, and the Society of Labor Economists.For more than three decades, Janet has pioneered research on the role of education, family background, social transfer programs, access to health care, and environmental factors in shaping the health and well-being of children and their outcomes as adults.She was a prime mover in making the study of the fetal period and child development an essential concern of labor economics.This pioneering work had a major influence on other fields, including the economics of education, health economics, public economics, and environmental economics.In the early 1990s, Janet started a research agenda on the effectiveness of early childhood

This paper uses a policy implemented in Chile that obliges firms to fully fund childcare costs for their female employees, but only if they hire more than 19 women. Using plant level data from manufacturing firms, we first show that this policy has had a substantially detrimental impact on the hiring of women above that threshold, in particular since the policy has become more binding, in industrial sectors that hire fewer women and in larger firms. We then use the response of firms to study whether women workers are more or less complementary to capital than men. We find that firms that avoid the legislation by having just below 20 female workers are significantly more capital intensive than firms just above the threshold. This suggests that firms that want to avoid being subject to the regulation replace women with capital but in such a way that the capital to men ratio increases. We use our estimates to calibrate a production function and find that our results are consistent with a framework where women are weakly substitutes with capital (while men are complementary) in this emerging economy’s manufacturing sector. This does not seem to be driven by a change in skill composition of the workforce. We also find some evidence of other changes: average wages and total workforce are lower for firms who hire 20 women than those who hire just below that threshold but labor productivity is unaltered. PRELIMINARY, PLEASE DO NOT CITE ∗We thank comments from seminar participants at IADB, PUC Chile and Toronto. All remaining errors are our own. †Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile ‡Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. §Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile and FinanceUC.

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.

This paper offers the first study of how changes in corporate R&D investment affect labor mobility. We show that increases in R&D spur employee departures to join start-ups’ founding teams. This appears to reflect employees taking the ideas, skills, or technologies created through the R&D process but not especially valuable to the R&D-investing firm to start-ups. The employee-founded start-ups tend to be outside the R&D-investing employer’s industry, suggesting that the underlying ideas would impose diversification costs on the R&D-investing firm. The start-ups are more likely to be VC backed, high tech, and high wage, pointing to substantial spillover benefits.

We revisit the estimation of industry wage differentials using linked employer-employee data. Cross-sectional industry differences overstate pay premiums due to unmeasured heterogeneity. Estimates based on models with person and industry effects understate true premiums: workers who switch to a higher-premium industry typically move from higher-paying firms in their origin industry to lower-paying firms in their destination (and vice versa). The corrected standard deviation of log wage effects is 0.122 across narrowly defined industries and is similar at higher levels of aggregation. Higher-skilled workers sort to higher-pay industries. Premiums and worker sorting are more variable in cities with higher-wage firms and higher-skilled workers.