Corrupt government hiring is common in developing countries. This paper uses original data to document the operation and consequences of corrupt a health bureaucracy. Hires pay bribes averaging 17 months salary, but contrary conventional wisdom, their observable quality comparable counterfactual merit-based hires. Exploiting variation across jobs, I show that allocations depend on correlation b...

We present unitary and sharing rule models of the household that explicitly account for three parental concerns that may lead to gender bias in the allocation of resources to children—equity, efficiency, and preferences. Deaton’s test of the effect of household composition on adult good expenditures is employed using data on fathers’ and mothers’ nutrient intake from the China Health and Nutrit...

Salience, Risky Choices and Gender Risk theories typically assume individuals make risky choices using probability weights that differ from objective probabilities. Recent theories suggest that probability weights vary depending on which portion of a risky environment is made salient. Using experimental data we show that salience affects young men and women differently, even after controlling f...

We conduct a real-effort task experiment where subjects’ performance translates into a donation to a charity. In a within-subjects design we vary the visibility of the donation (no/private/public feedback). Confirming previous studies, we find that subjects’ performance increases, that is, they donate more to charity, when their relative performance is made public. In line with the competitive ...

Using three representative individual-level datasets for West Germany, we estimate the effect of the extension of maternity leave from 18 to 36 months on young women’s participation in job-related training. Specifically, we employ difference-indifferences identification strategies using control groups of older women and older women together with young and older men. We find that maternity leave...

An unresolved debate in the development literature concerns the impact of gender inequality on economic growth. Previous studies have found that the effect varies, depending on the measure of inequality (wages or capabilities). This paper expands that discussion by considering both the shortand long-run, evaluating the effects of gender equality in two types of economies—semi-industrialized eco...

We use unique worker-plant matched panel data to measure differences in wage changes experienced by workers displaced from closing plants. We observe larger losses among women than men, comparing workers who move from the same closing plant to the same new firm. However, we find a significantly smaller gap in hiring firms with female leadership. The results are strongest among women who are dis...

Beauty Queens and Battling Knights: Risk Taking and Attractiveness in Chess We explore the relationship between attractiveness and risk taking in chess. We use a large international panel dataset on chess competitions which includes a control for the players’ skill in chess. This data is combined with results from a survey on an online labor market where participants were asked to rate the phot...

Does the lack of peers contribute to the observed gender gap in entrepreneurial success? A random sample of customers of India’s largest women’s bank was offered two days of business counseling, and a random subsample was invited to attend with a friend. The intervention significantly increased participants’ business activity, but only if they were trained with a friend. Those trained with a fr...

This paper investigates wage assimilation of foreign-born male workers in Britain over the period 1993 to 2009. Using Labour Force Survey data, the paper employs a methodology (Blinder-Oaxaca quantile regressions) to decompose the immigrant-native wage differential at the mean and across the conditional wage distribution. Although immigrants earn more on average than natives, mean results mask ...