Although women earn approximately 50% of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) bachelor's degrees, more than 70% 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 United States Air...

This paper examines the role of the sociocultural background of students for choosing STEM fields in university. We combine rich survey data on university graduates in Switzerland with municipality level information from the census as well as nationwide elections and referenda to characterize a...

Sleep studies suggest that girls go to sleep earlier, are more active in the morning, and cope with sleep deprivation better than boys. We provide the first causal evidence on how gender differences in sleep cycles can help explain the gender performance gap. We exploit over 240,000...

This paper surveys the trends in gender gaps in education, their causes and potential policy implications. I show that female educational attainment has surpassed, or is about to surpass, male educational attainment in most industrialized countries. These gaps reflect male overrepresentation...

Cross-country studies reveal two consistent gender gaps in education—underachievement in school by boys and low rates of participation in STEM studies by girls. Recent economics research has shown the importance of social influences on women's STEM avoidance, but male low achievement has been...

Much attention is focused on finding ways to encourage females to study STEM in school and college but what actually happens once women complete a STEM degree? We use the UK Quarterly Labour Force Survey to trace out gender differences in STEM persistence over the career. We find a continuous...

Empirical investigations with enterprise level data from official statistics often use the averagewage as a proxy variable for the qualification of the workforce, mostly due to the lack ofdetailed information on the qualification of the employees. This paper uses unique newlyavailable data for...

We use spline interpolation to approximate the subjective cumulative distribution function ofan economic agent over the future realization of a continuous (possibly censored) randomvariable. The method proposed exploits information collected using a small number ofprobability questions on...

Using data on annual individual labor income from three representative panel datasets(German SOEP, British BHPS, Australian HILDA) we investigate a) the selectivity of itemnon-response (INR) and b) the impact of imputation as a prominent post-survey means tocope with this type of measurement...

This paper examines the impact of self-reported work limitation on the labour forceparticipation of the Australian working age population. Five consecutive waves of theHousehold, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey are used toinvestigate this relationship...