Bureaucracies are configured differently to private sector and political organizations. Across a wide range of civil services entry is competitive, promotion is constrained by seniority, jobs are for life and retirement occurs at a fixed age. This implies that older entering officers, who are less likely to attain the glittering prize of reaching the top of the bureaucracy before they retire, may be less motivated to exert effort. Using a nationwide stakeholder survey and rich administrative data on elite civil servants in India we provide evidence that: (i) officers who cannot reach the senior-most positions before they retire are perceived to be less effective and are more likely to be suspended and (ii) this effect is weakened by a reform that extends the retirement age. Together these results suggest that the career incentive of reaching the top of a public organization is a powerful determinant of bureaucrat performance.

In most of the developed world, skilled women marry at a lower rate than less skilled ones. We document heterogeneity across countries in how the marriage gap between skilled and unskilled women has evolved over time. As labour market opportunities for women have improved, the marriage gap has been growing in some countries but shrinking in others. We discuss the comparative statics of a theoretical model in which the (negative) social attitudes toward working women might contribute to the relatively lower marriage rate of skilled women and might also induce a non-monotonic relationship between their labour market prospects and their marriage outcomes. The model delivers predictions about how the skilled–unskilled marriage gap should react to changes in labour market opportunities across economies with more or less conservative attitudes toward working women. We verify the key predictions of this model in a panel of 26 developed countries, as well as in a panel of U.S. states.

In late 2003, Norway passed a law mandating 40% representation of each gender on the board of public limited liability companies. The primary objective of this reform was to increase the representation of women in top positions in the corporate sector and decrease the gender disparity in earnings within that sector. We document that the women appointed to these boards post-reform were observably more qualified than their female predecessors along many dimensions, and that the gender gap in earnings within boards fell substantially. However, we see no robust evidence that the reform benefited the larger set of women employed in the companies subject to the quota. Moreover, the reform had no clear impact on highly qualified women whose qualifications mirror those of board members but who were not appointed to boards. Finally, we find mixed support for the view that the reform affected the decisions of young women. While the reform was not accompanied by any change in female enrollment in business education programmes, we do see some improvements in labour market outcomes for young women with graduate business degrees in their early career stages; however, we observe similar improvements for young women with graduate science degrees, suggesting this may not be due to the reform. Overall, seven years after the board quota policy fully came into effect, we conclude that it had very little discernible impact on women in business beyond its direct effect on the women who made it into boardrooms.