This paper exploits biological fertility shocks as instrumental variables to estimate the effect of motherhood delay on the cognitive ability of the next generation. Using detailed panel data on women in the NLSY79 and their first-born children aged 5 to 14, we find a year of delay leads to significant increases in math and reading scores: a 7 year delay produces gains on par with the black-white score difference. These results reveal a potential weakness of pro-natalist policies promoting early motherhood. While such policies may increase total period fertility rates, they will be less effective at increasing total human capital.

This paper examines the role of women helping women in corporate America. Using a merged panel of directors and executives for large US corporations between 1997 and 2009, we find a positive association between the female share of the board of directors in the previous year and the female share among current top executives. The relationship's timing suggests that causality runs from boards to managers and not the reverse. This pattern of women helping women at the highest levels of firm leadership highlights the continued importance of a demand-side “glass ceiling” in explaining the slow progress of women in business.

We study the impact of the integration of women in U.S. policing between the late 1970s and early 1990s on violent crime reporting and domestic violence (DV). Along these two key dimensions, we find that female officers improved police quality. Crime victimization data reveal that as female representation increases among officers in an area, violent crimes against women in that area, and especially DV, are reported to the police at significantly higher rates. There are no such effects for violent crimes against men or from increases in the female share of civilian police employees. Furthermore, increases in female officer shares are followed by significant declines in rates of intimate partner homicide and non-fatal domestic abuse. These effects are all consistent between fixed effects models with controls for economic and policy variables and models that focus exclusively on increases in female police employment driven by externally imposed affirmative action plans following litigation for employment discrimination.

We study gender spillovers in career advancement using eleven years of employer-employee matched data on white-collar workers at over 4, 000 private sector workplaces in Norway. Our data allow us to define seven hierarchical ranks that are consistent across plants and over time and track promotions even for individuals who change employers. We find positive spillovers across ranks (flowing from higher-ranking to lower-ranking women) but negative spillovers within ranks. The finding of narrower gender gaps in promotions for workers with more female bosses suggests that policies that increase female representation in corporate leadership can have spillover benefits to women in lower ranks.

This paper exploits variation in the timing and outcomes of employment discrimination lawsuits against U.S. law enforcement agencies to estimate the cumulative and persistent employment effects of temporary externally imposed affirmative action (AA). We find that AA increased black employment at all ranks by 4.5 to 6.2 percentage points relative to national trends. We also find no erosion of these employment gains in the fifteen years following AA termination, although black employment growth was significantly lower in departments after AA ended than in departments whose plans continued. For women, in contrast, we find only marginal employment gains at lower ranks.

Electronic medical records (EMRs) facilitate fast and accurate access to patient records, which could improve diagnosis and patient monitoring. Using a 12-year county-level panel, we find that a 10 percent increase in births that occur in hospitals with EMRs reduces neonatal mortality by 16 deaths per 100,000 live births. This is driven by a reduction of deaths from conditions requiring careful monitoring. We also find a strong decrease in mortality when we instrument for EMR adoption using variation in state medical privacy laws. Rough cost-effectiveness calculations suggest that EMRs are associated with a cost of $531,000 per baby’s life saved.