Two centuries ago, in most countries around the world, women were unable to vote, had no say over their own children or property, and could not obtain a divorce. Women have gradually gained rights in many areas of life, and this legal expansion has been closely intertwined with economic...

This paper examines the gender gap in log earnings among full-time, college-educated workers born between 1931 and 1984. Using data from the National Survey of College Graduates and other sources, we decompose the gender earnings gap across birth cohorts into three components: (i) gender...

Stronger enforcement of discrimination laws can help to reduce disparities in economic outcomes with respect to race, ethnicity, and gender in the United States. However, the data necessary to detect possible discrimination and to act to counter it is not publicly available - in particular, data...

This paper provides an overview of what has happened over the past fifty years for women as they worked to break through professional barriers in economics, policy, and institutional leadership. We chart the progress of women in higher education at the college level and beyond and then go on to...

Gendered-grammar languages like Spanish are spoken by 39% of the world's population. In a field experiment in partnership with a Spanish-speaking online platform for technology positions, ads randomly selected to use gender-neutral language receive a larger share of female applicants for...

This paper combines personnel records of the U.S. federal government with census data to study how shocks to the gender composition of a large organization can persistently shift gender norms. Exploiting city-by-department variation in the sudden expansion of female clerical employment driven by...

This paper shows that large, multi-establishment business enterprises face a high cost of middle management in poor countries and that this cost inhibits the growth of the modern sector. We provide new empirical evidence using a database covering compensation for 300,000 middle managers working...

Technological advance is often embodied in capital inputs. This paper develops a model where capital innovations occur on two margins: (1) vertically, where a capital input becomes more productive at a given task; and (2) horizontally, where a capital input replaces labor at a given task. These...

We study the global innovation and diffusion of ideas by introducing trade into the model in Eaton and Kortum (1999) (EK). This extension allows us to use international trade flows and country-level factor costs to estimate both the intensity of innovation within countries over time and...

The dismal decade of 2010-19 recorded the slowest productivity growth of any decade in U.S. history, only 1.1 percent per year in the business sector. Yet the pandemic appears to have created a resurgence in productivity growth with a 4.1 percent rate achieved in the four quarters of 2020. This...