A growing theoretical literature on the effect of politicians' salaries on the average level of skills of political candidates yields ambiguous predictions. In this paper, we estimate the effect of pay for politicians on the level of education of parliamentary candidates. We take advantage of an...

In this study we analyze whether the gender composition of siblings within a family affects the choice of College Major. The question is whether a family environment that is more gender-homogeneous encourages academic choices that are less gender stereotyped. We use the last name and the exact...

Using an originally constructed dataset that follows 30,000 Italian individuals from high school to the labor market, we analyze whether the gender composition of peers in high school affected their choice of college major, their academic performance and their labor market income. We exploit the...

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...

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" to...

We present a theoretical and empirical analysis of the links between the gender of an entrepreneur, access to finance, occupational choice, and business performance. Our theoretical model predicts that, when lenders discriminate against women entrepreneurs, the average entrepreneurial skill of...

Using a multi-dimensional measure of occupational mismatch, we report distinct gender differences in match quality and changes in match quality over the course of careers. A substantial portion of the gender wage gap stems from match quality differences among more educated individuals....