We exploit a natural experiment in which two professionals compete in a one-stage contest without strategic motives and where one contestant has a clear exogenous psychological momentum advantage over the other in order to estimate the causal effect of psychological momentum on performance. We...

The proportion female in the economics profession in the U.S. has been low historically compared with other disciplines. Although the percentage of Ph.D. degrees awarded to women and the representation of women on faculties have increased over time, economics still lags many other fields....

This paper attempts to reconcile the contradictory results found in the economics literature and the educational psychology literature with respect to the academic impact of gender dynamics in the classroom. Specifically, using data from a randomized experiment, we look at the effects of having...

We investigate the historical determinants of the education gender gap in Italy in the late nineteenth century, immediately following the country's Unification. We use a comprehensive newly-assembled database including 69 provinces over twenty-year sub-samples covering the 1861-1901 period. We...

We investigate the role of social norms in accounting for differences in self-reported health as reported by men and women. Using the European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS, 2010), we first replicate the standard result that women report worse health than men, whatever the health outcome we...

In almost all European Union countries, the gender wage gap is increasing across the wages distribution. In this lecture I briefly survey some recent studies aiming to explain why apparently identical women and men receive such different returns and focus especially on those incorporating...

Using a natural experiment in Taiwan, this paper shows that exposure to male-biased sex ratios at the marriageable ages is associated with a greater likelihood of death in later life. Half a million soldiers from Mainland China who retreated to Taiwan after a civil war in the late 1940s were...

This paper, based on a large-scale field experiment, tests whether a one-hour exposure to external female role models with a background in science affects students' perceptions and choice of field of study. Using a random assignment of classroom interventions carried out by 56 female scientists...

We offer a rationale for the decision to extend the franchise to women within a politico-economic model where men are richer than women, women display a higher preference for public goods, and women's disenfranchisement carries a societal cost. We first derive the tax rate chosen by the male...

The time allocated to household chores is substantial, with the burden falling disproportionately upon women. Further, social norms about how much work men and women should contribute in the home are likely to influence couples' housework allocation decisions and evaluations of their lot. Using...