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...

Women are less likely than men to earn degrees from high-quality post-baccalaureate programs, and this tendency has been growing over time. I show that, aside from the biomedical sciences, this can not be explained by changes in the type of program where women tend to earn degrees. Instead,...

Women earn less than men but are not less satisfied with life. This paper explores whether norms regarding the appropriate pay for women compared to men may explain these findings. In order to capture the spatial variation in such norms, we take community level information on citizens' approval...

Economists increasingly accept that social norms have powerful effects on human behavior and outcomes. In recent history, one norm widely adhered to in most developed nations has been for men to be the primary breadwinner within mixed-gender households. As women have entered the labor market in...

Using Bertrand, Kamenica and Pan’s (2015) original data, we find that female breadwinning is significantly associated with partnership problems only for older women in cross sections, but for younger ones in fixed-effects specifications. In more recent US and Australian data, female...

Women earn less than men but are not less satisfied with life. This paper argues that norms on the appropriate pay for women compared to men explain these findings. We take citizens? approval of an equal rights amendment to the Swiss constitution as a proxy for the norm that ?women and men shall...

Previous research has documented the importance and persistence of social norms, but there is limited understanding of whether they are capable of changing in the short run. Utilizing data from Sweden and Denmark, this article addresses this gap by testing whether significant local shocks may...

The current study aims to investigate how the presence of social norms defines belief formation on future changes in social identity (i.e., diachronic identity), and how those beliefs affect individual decisions under uncertainty. The paper proposes a theoretical model in which individuals have...

I use the universe of tax returns in Germany and a regression kink design to estimate the impact of the benefit amount available to high-earning women after their first childbirth on subsequent within-couple earnings inequality. Lower benefit amounts result in a reduced earnings gap that...