Working papers results

Sexual harassment and sexists behaviors are pervasive issues in the workplace. Around 12% of women in France have been subjected to toxic behaviors at work in the last year, including sexist comments, moral, sexual or physical harassment, or violence. Such toxic behaviors can not only deter women from entering the labor market, but can also lead them to leave toxic workplaces at their own expense. This article is one of the first to examine the relationship between toxic behaviors and worker flows. We use the #MeToo movement as an exogenous shock to France’s workplace norms regarding toxic behaviors. We combine survey data on reported toxic behaviors in firms with exhaustive administrative data to create a measure of toxic behaviors risk for all French establishments. We use a triple-difference strategy comparing female and male worker flows in high-risk versus low-risk firms before and after #MeToo. We find that #MeToo increased women’s relative quit rates in higher-risk workplaces, while men’s worker flows remained unaffected. This demonstrates the existence of a double penalty for women working in high-risk environments, as they are not only more frequently the victims of toxic behaviors, but are also forced to quit their jobs in order to avoid them.

Scarcity of female academics has been well documented for math-intensive or STEM fields. We investigate whether a lack of female instructors creates a demand for diversity on the student side. In an incentivized instructor-choice experiment on MTurk, we experimentally vary the gender balancedness of the instructor pool and let participants choose one additional instructor among one male and one female. We find that only women are more likely to choose the female instructor when the pool of instructors is male-dominated, suggesting that female students appreciate a more balanced instructor pool if female professors are scarce. We further document that women also appreciate diversity (though to a lesser extent) if the scarce gender is of the opposite sex. In contrast, men only appreciate diversity if the scarce gender is their own.

Understanding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on education requires a solid grasp of the impact of student autonomy on learning. In this paper, we estimate the effect of an increased autonomy policy for higher-performing students on short- and longer-term school outcomes. We exploit an institutional setting with high demand for autonomy in randomly formed classrooms. Identification comes from a natural experiment that allowed higher-achieving students to miss 30 percent more classes without penalty. Using a difference-in-difference-in-differences approach, we find that allowing higher-achieving students to skip class more often improves their performance in high-stakes subjects and increases their university admission outcomes. Higher-achieving students in more academically diverse classrooms exerted more autonomy when allowed to.

In the past decade, the world has witnessed increased climate change impacts with many countries experiencing more frequent and more severe climate extremes. With public support being fundamental in scaling up climate action, here, we analyze the impact of exposure to climate extremes on environmental concern and Green voting for a large panel of European countries. Combining high-resolution climatological data with regionally aggregated and harmonized information on environmental concern (42 Eurobarometer surveys, 2002-2019, 34 countries) and European Parliamentary electoral outcomes (7 elections, 1990-2019, 28 countries) at the subnational level, we find a significant and sizeable effect of temperature anomalies, heat episodes and dry spells in the previous 12 months on green concern and voting. The effects differ significantly by region and are most pronounced in regions with a cooler Continental or temperate Atlantic climate, and weaker in regions with a warmer Mediterranean climate. The relationship is moderated by regional GDP suggesting that climate change experience increase public support for climate action only under favorable economic conditions. By empirically documenting the important role of contextual influences and regional differences on green concern and voting, our findings have important implications for the current efforts to promote and implement climate actions in line with the Paris Agreement.

The mounting evidence on the demographics of COVID-19 fatalities points to an overrepresentation of minorities and an underrepresentation of women. Using individual-level, race-disaggregated, and georeferenced death data collected by the Cook County Medical Examiner, we jointly investigate the racial and gendered impact of COVID-19, its timing, and its determinants. Through an event study approach we establish that Blacks individuals are affected earlier and more harshly and that the effect is driven by Black women. Rather than comorbidity or aging, the Black female bias is associated with poverty and channeled by occupational segregation in the health care and transportation sectors and by commuting on public transport. Living arrangements and lack of health insurance are instead found uninfluential. The Black female bias is spatially concentrated in neighborhoods that were subject to historical redlining.

Gender norms, i.e. the role of men and women in the society, are a fundamental channel through which culture may influence preferences for redistribution and public policies. We consider both cross-country and individual level evidence on this mechanism. We find that in countries that are historically more gender-equal the tax system today is more redistributive. At the individual level, we find that in more gender equal countries gender differences in redistributive preferences are significantly larger. This effect is driven by women becoming systematically more favorable to redistribution, while there are no significant changes for men. Interestingly, there is no gender-based difference in preferences for redistribution among left-leaning citizens, while this difference is significant among moderates in the expected direction: ideologically moderate women are more favorable to redistribution than moderate men, and this effect is even stronger among right-leaning individuals.

We here address the causal relationship between maternal depression and child human capital using UK cohort data. We exploit the conditionally-exogenous variation in mothers’ genomes in an instrumental-variable approach, and describe the conditions under which mother’s genetic variants can be used as valid instruments. An additional episode of maternal depression between the child’s birth up to age nine reduces both their cognitive and non-cognitive skills by 20 to 45% of a SD throughout adolescence. Our results are robust to a battery of sensitivity tests addressing, among others, concerns about pleiotropy and the maternal transmission of genes to her child.

The association between social classes and fertility behaviour remains undertheorized as the literature focused mostly on the differentials in education and income levels as determinants of fertility behaviour. By using data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), which for many countries combine a cross-sectional and a longitudinal component, we aim at filling this gap in the literature. Hence, we first explore the association between social classes and fertility behaviour and the extent to which this association is moderated by education and income. Secondly, we consider how this association varies by parity. Results underline the role of social class in affecting individuals’ fertility, over and above education and income.

We develop a statistical discrimination model where groups of workers (males-females) differ in the observability of their productivity signals by the evaluation committee. We assume that the informativeness of the productivity signals depends on the match between the potential worker and the interviewer: when both parties have similar backgrounds, the signal is likely to be more informative. Under this “homo-accuracy” bias, the group that is most represented in the evaluation committee generates more accurate signals, and, consequently, has a greater incentive to invest in human capital. This generates a discrimination trap. If, for some exogenous reason, one group is initially poorly evaluated (less represented into the evaluation committee), this translates into lower investment in human capital of individuals of such group, which leads to lower representation in the evaluation committee in the future, generating a persistent discrimination process. We explore this dynamic process and show that quotas may be effective to deal with this discrimination trap. In particular, we show that introducing a “temporary” quota allows to reach a steady state equilibrium with a higher welfare than the one obtained in the decentralized equilibrium in which talented workers of the discriminated group decide not to invest in human capital. Finally, if the discriminated group is underrepresented in the worker population (race), restoring efficiency requires to implement a “permanent” system of quotas.

We empirically investigate the existence of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) focusing on a sample of 39 countries in the period 1996-2014. Using an interaction model, we also analyze whether the effectiveness of environmental taxes in reducing CO 2 emissions depends on the quality of political institutions. Our results show that the inverted U-shaped relationship between environmental stress and economic development holds independently of the quality of political institutions and environment related taxes. Moreover, an increase in the environmental tax revenue has the expected reducing effect on environmental degradation only in countries with more consolidated democratic institutions, higher civil society participation and less corrupt governments. Our findings also show that the effects on environmental stress of revenue neutral shifts to different tax sources depend not only on the quality of political institutions, but also on the kind of externality the policymaker aims at correcting.