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on Gender |
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Issue of 2026–06–29
ten papers chosen by Jan Sauermann, Institutet för Arbetsmarknads- och Utbildningspolitisk Utvärdering |
| By: | Singhal, Karan (University of Luxembourg); Grabka, Markus (DIW Berlin); Sierminska, Eva (Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER)) |
| Abstract: | We study gender disparities in intergenerational wealth transfers in Germany over more than four decades, focusing on inheritances and inter vivos gifts. Using individual-level data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we document persistent gaps: while women are in some cases more likely to report receiving an inheritance, men are more likely to receive gifts and obtain larger overall transfer amounts. These differences are not uniform. In West Germany, younger women face particularly large disadvantages in gifts, whereas no systematic gaps are observed in East Germany. We also show that transfers, particularly gifts, contribute to the gender wealth gap. Oaxaca–Blinder decompositions indicate that gifts account for a measurable share of the mean gap in 2019, and RIF decompositions re-veal that transfer amounts contribute to both explained and unexplained components across the wealth distribution. Despite gender-neutral inheritance law, our findings suggest that testamentary freedom and persistent social norms continue to generate unequal outcomes. Addressing these disparities is essential in preventing wealth transfers from reinforcing intergenerational and gender-based economic inequality. |
| Keywords: | inheritances, gift, gender, SOEP, wealth gap, RIF-regression |
| JEL: | D64 J16 |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18706 |
| By: | Felipe Araujo; Neeraja Gupta; Lise Vesterlund |
| Abstract: | We assess the empirical evidence for the hypothesis that women more than men respond to changes in treatment. First, we examine whether the results of over two hundred experimental economics papers support the female sensitivity hypothesis. Second, using data from two studies (DellaVigna and Pope, 2022; Exley et al., 2025), we conduct over two hundred pairwise tests of the hypothesis. Both analyses show that gender is not predictive of responsiveness to treatment. We further examine how the hypothesis has been disseminated in the literature and find that it is referenced predominantly by papers that support it. |
| JEL: | C9 J16 |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35324 |
| By: | Giuseppe Attanasi; Giuseppe Ciccarone; Giovanni Di Bartolomeo; Valentina Peruzzi; Marilena Vecco |
| Abstract: | This paper studies how gender and reputation jointly shape valuation in the visual art market. We develop a microfounded benchmark auction model in which artwork prices depend on artists' effort, reputation, and gender. The model predicts that the price discount for female artists should decline with reputation and become negligible at sufficiently high levels of reputation. We test these predictions using two complementary approaches. First, we examine 67, 615 auction sales by 686 living contemporary artists over 1996-2014. Conditional on rich artwork and artist characteristics, nationality fixed effects, and year-by-location auction fixed effects, we find that works by female artists sell for less than comparable works by male artists, but this discount shrinks substantially with formal recognition and market standing. Second, we conduct a pre-registered experiment in a controlled auction setting to isolate demand-side valuation mechanisms. The experimental evidence confirms the same pattern: bids for works attributed to female artists are lower on average, and the gap narrows sharply when the artist is presented as highly reputed. |
| Keywords: | Gender inequality, reputation, art markets, auction data, theory-driven experiment |
| JEL: | J16 D44 D82 C91 Z11 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ter:wpaper:00196 |
| By: | Jocelyn Wikle; Riley Wilson |
| Abstract: | Over the last 70 years, there has been a dramatic increase in female labor supply. However, gender gaps in employment trajectories remain, in part because the role of childrearing has largely fallen upon women. Providing more publicly funded childcare could relax these constraints, which may have ramifications for mothers' labor supply decisions over time. We examine the dynamic effects of gaining childcare access earlier on mothers' labor supply. Using a regression discontinuity in kindergarten eligibility cutoffs for nearly 7.5 million U.S. mothers, we estimate how gaining access to childcare, through public school, one year earlier affects maternal employment over time. Enrolling a child in school one year earlier increases annual maternal employment by 2.2 percentage points, and the effect persists for two years, even though children born after the eligibility cutoff gain similar access the next year. However, employment effects eventually fade out, highlighting the limited role publicly-provided childcare plays in closing long-term gender gaps. We show that mothers take on additional family management responsibilities after childbirth, and these responsibilities are not relaxed by gaining childcare access. Moving childcare access earlier will not necessarily close gender gaps in employment as mothers still face these additional constraints. |
| Keywords: | maternal labor supply, public school, kindergarten |
| JEL: | H75 I28 J13 J16 J22 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12727 |
| By: | Yoko Okuyama; Takeshi Murooka; Shintaro Yamaguchi |
| Abstract: | We estimate the child penalty using detailed personnel records that allow decomposition into distinct pay components. The penalty initially arises from reductions in time-based pay after childbirth. Over time, job-rank-based pay becomes increasingly significant. These effects are interconnected: reduced working hours lead to lower performance evaluations, which subsequently limit promotion opportunities. Our model demonstrates that current promotion practices, which reward extended hours at entry-level positions, can generate production inefficiency. This finding suggests that addressing promotion practices could simultaneously reduce gender inequality and improve talent allocation, making a business case for organizational reform. |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dpr:wpaper:1314 |
| By: | Amaral, Sofia (World Bank); Chaney, Kim (University at Buffalo); Kaiser, Victoria (Bavarian Ministry of Economic Affairs, Regional Development and Energy); Prakash, Nishith (Northeastern University); Sahay, Abhilasha (The World Bank) |
| Abstract: | Police officers' discretionary handling of gender-based violence (GBV) complaints is a critical barrier to justice in developing countries. We collaborate with the Madhya Pradesh Police in India to conduct a lab-in-the-field experiment with 323 officers, studying the effect of confronting officers with evidence of their biased handling of a fictitious GBV case. We find no average effect, but sharply divergent responses by officer gender. Confronted female officers prioritize the victim's statement by 23 percentage points more than controls, a 27 percent increase relative to the control mean. Male officers exhibit a backlash: they deprioritize the victim's statement, elevate the offender's, and assign more negative stereotypes to GBV victims one week after confrontation. A likely explanation is the stark difference in baseline bias: 72 percent of female officers display only mild bias, while 51 percent of male officers are strongly biased. Because policing is male-dominated, women are more willing to de-bias their case handling while men are not. Interventions targeting officer bias must account for gender-differentiated responses to avoid unintended consequences. |
| Keywords: | prejudice confrontation, gender heterogeneity, gender-based violence, police bias, backlash, stereotype reduction, lab-in-the-field experiment, India |
| JEL: | J16 J45 K42 K14 C93 D91 O12 O15 |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18699 |
| By: | Arianna Antezza; Alina Meiner; Katharina Wrohlich |
| Abstract: | In the annual DIW Women Executives Barometer, we document the share of women on the executive and supervisory boards of the largest companies in Germany. We separately analyse different groups of companies, among which there are the 200 companies with the highest turnover in Germany outside the financial sector (top 200 companies), all companies listed in the German stock index DAX (DAX companies) as well as the four DAX subgroups (DAX-30/40, MDAX, SDAX and TecDax), all companies with federal participation, the 100 largest banks and the 60 largest insurance companies. Moreover, we separately document the share of women on the executive and supervisory boards for companies that have to comply to the gender quota for supervisory boards (since 2016) and the minimum participation requirement for executive boards (since 2022). |
| Keywords: | Women managers, Share of women, Executive board, Labor and Employment, Supervisory board, Economics, Gender |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:diw:diwddc:dd118 |
| By: | Anna Bindler; Barbara Boelmann; Lena Janys and Luisa H. Santiago Wolf |
| Abstract: | How do labor demand shocks affect workforce diversity in the absence of targeted diversity policies? A conceptual framework illustrates the potential trade-off between the demographic and quality composition of a workforce when there is a positive labor demand shock. Exploiting the German reunification as a natural experiment, we analyze the academic labor market where nearly all social sciences professors in East Germany were replaced while STEM faculty remained largely unchanged. Using administrative data and a regional difference-in-differences design, we find increased dispersion in the institutional quality of hires, indicating that the new hires came from less select departments. At the same time, female representation did not increase despite qualified women in the pipeline. Instead, East German hiring patterns converged to those in West Germany in terms of gender composition. In simulations, we investigate implied losses: Under conservative assumptions, we show that, considering the pipeline of qualified applicants, the marginal female hire’s quality is approximately half a standard deviation higher than the marginal male hire’s quality. |
| Keywords: | Labor demand, diversity, higher education, universities |
| JEL: | I23 J23 J45 J70 J82 N34 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:diw:diwwpp:dp2169 |
| By: | Ahmet Gulek; Christina Langer |
| Abstract: | We study the effect of the post-COVID expansion of remote work on the child penalty. Our empirical design proceeds in three steps: using pseudo-panels to estimate child penalties across occupations, exploiting cross-occupational variation in remote work adoption, and using synthetic controls to adjust for differential pre-COVID trajectories. Remote work reduces the hours penalty for mothers: each percentage point increase in an occupation's remote work share raises mothers' hours worked by 0.23%, eliminating one-sixth of the baseline motherhood penalty for the average remote occupation. We find no effects on employment, income, or wages for mothers, and no average effects on men. |
| Keywords: | Working from Home, Child Penalty, Gender Inequality |
| JEL: | J13 J16 J22 J31 |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26162 |
| By: | Philipp Ager; Davide M. Coluccia |
| Abstract: | This paper provides novel evidence on how technological change shaped women’s labor market participation, fertility, and marriage in 19th-century Massachusetts. We distin guish between the sewing machine’s dual role as a manufacturing technology and as a household appliance. Using rich town- and individual-level longitudinal data, we show that this innovation induced divergent responses across the wealth distribution. Women from lower-wealth households increased labor supply, delaying marriage and reducing fertility. In contrast, for wealthierwomen, thesewingmachinefunctionedasadomesticef ficiency tool, enabling earlier family formation and greater civic engagement while reducing market work. Ourfindings demonstrate how household constraints and social norms mediate the effects of labor-saving technologies, suggesting that technological progress can reinforce inequality by influencing women’s economic and social roles. |
| Keywords: | Technology, Gender, Female Labor Force Participation, Fertility. |
| JEL: | J13 J16 N31 N61 O33 |
| Date: | 2026–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bon:boncrc:crctr224_2025_761 |