This paper investigates how high school gender composition affects students' participation in STEM at college. Using Danish administrative data, we exploit idiosyncratic within-school variation in gender composition. We find that having a larger proportion of female peers reduces women's...

When other measures for economic welfare are scarce or unreliable, the body mass index (BMI) is a biological measure that reflects current net nutrition. This study uses a difference-in-decompositions framework to analyze how women's BMIs varied with the advent of early 20th century social...

Using new survey data collected in April 2020 from a representative sample of Italian women, we analyse jointly the effect of COVID-19 on the working arrangements, housework and childcare of couples where both partners work. ties. According to our empirical estimates, changes to the amount of...

There is a well-known gender difference in time allocation within the household, which has important implications for gender differences in labor market outcomes. We ask how malleable this gender difference in time allocation is to culture. In particular, we ask if US immigrants allocate tasks...

We empirically analyze the effect of UN and US economic sanctions on life expectancy and its gender gap in target countries. Our sample covers 98 less developed and newly industrialized countries over the period 1977–2012. We employ a matching approach to account for the endogeneity of...

We study response behavior in surveys and show how the explanatory power of self-reports can be improved. First, we develop a choice model of survey response behavior under the assumption that the respondent has imperfect self-knowledge about her individual characteristics. In panel data, the...

Weaker retention of women in quantitatively oriented fields, particularly STEM* is widely seen in US higher education. This persistence gap is often explained by less generous grading in these fields and the conjectured tendency of female students to generally exhibit stronger “sensitivity”...

In this paper, we investigate whether the expansion of childcare leads to an increase in the female labour supply. We measure female labour supply at both the extensive and intensive margin. For identification, we exploit a nationwide reform that expanded childcare for 1–2- year-olds in...

We explore the effects of a child labor regulation that changed the legal working age from 14 to 16 over the health of their offspring. We show that the reform was detrimental for the health of the son’s of affected parents at delivery. Yet, in the medium run, the effects of the reform are...

In this paper, we provide estimates of the subjectively perceived cost of children depending on the extent of parental time restrictions. Building on a study by Koulovatianos et al. (2009) that introduces a novel way of using subjective income evaluation data for such estimations, we conduct a...