This paper estimates gender differences in access to informal information regarding the labor market. We conduct a large-scale field experiment in which real college students seek information from 10,000 working professionals about various career paths, and we randomize whether a professional...

We propose a management career model where females face a gender-specific career hurdle. We show that female managers will, on average, be more skilled than male managers, since females from the low end of the talent distribution will abstain from investing in a career as a manager. The average...

How much does your neighbor impact your test scores and career? In this paper, we examine how an observable characteristic of same-age neighbors—their gender—affects a variety of high school and university outcomes. We exploit randomness in the gender composition of local cohorts at birth...

We consider an R&D-driven endogenous growth model in which innovation is risky and agents are risk averse. Growth is determined by the occupational choice of agents who can either work in production for a wage or become entrepreneurs. In this context, we examine the impact of redistributive...

We incorporate the concept of social identity into a stylized model of occupational choice and analyze whether an individual's identity affects his or her decision to become an entrepreneur. We argue that an entrepreneurial identity results from an individual's socialization. This could be...

Family and social networks are widely believed to influence important life decisions but identifying their causal effects is notoriously difficult. Using admissions thresholds that directly affect older but not younger siblings' college options, we present evidence from the United States, Chile,...

This paper studies the impact of optimism on occupational choice using a general equilibrium framework. The model shows that optimism has four main qualitative effects: it leads to a misallocation of talent, drives up input prices, raises the number of entrepreneurs, and makes entrepreneurs...

Although women earn approximately 50 percent of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) bachelor’s degrees, more than 70 percent of scientists and engineers are men. We explore a potential determinant of this STEM gender gap using newly collected data on the career trajectories of...

We consider a private sector job that offers high-powered incentives and two public sector jobs that produce an identical public good, but only one of them offers opportunities for corruption. Our theoretical predictions relate occupation and effort choices, in these three jobs, to preferences...

We examine gender gaps in career dynamics in the legal sector using rich panel data from one of the largest global law firms in the world. The law firm studied is representative of multinational law firms and operates in 23 countries. The sample includes countries at different stages of...