Due to conventional gender norms, women are more likely to be in charge of childcare than men. From an employer’s perspective, in their fertile age they are also at “risk” of pregnancy. Both factors potentially affect hiring practices of firms. We conduct a largescale correspondence test...

We provide the first causal evidence of discrimination against migrants seeking child care. We send emails from fictitious parents to 18, 000 early child care centers across Germany, asking if there is a slot available and how to apply. Randomly varying names to signal migration background, we...

We report on several experiments on the optimal allocation of ownership rights. The experiments confirm the property rights approach by showing that the ownership structure affects relationship-specific investments and that subjects attain the most efficient ownership allocation despite starting...

Labor market opportunities and wages may be unfair for various reasons, and how workers respond to different types of unfairness can have major economic consequences. Using an online labor platform, where workers engage in an individual task for a piece-rate wage, we investigate the causal...

A key prediction of discrimination models is that competition in the labor market serves as a moderating force on employer discrimination. In the presence of market frictions, however, recessions create excess labor supply and thus generate opportunities to engage in discriminatory behaviors far...

We propose a competitive general equilibrium theory of gender discrimination in labor market where male and female workers are equally productive, but the female workers are deliberately paid less than the male due to subjective discrimination. Pioneering works of Becker (1957) and Arrow (1973),...

We provide the first systematic account of summer declines in women’s labor market activity. From May to July, the employment-to-population ratio among prime-age US women declines by 1.1 percentage points, whereas male employment rises; women’s total hours worked fall by 11 percent, twice...

Gender differences in overconfidence have been extensively documented in the empirical literature, but the implications for labor market outcomes are not well understood. In this paper, we analyze how men’s relatively higher overconfidence, combined with competitive job incentives, affects...