Is New Platform Work Different from Other Freelancing?

By Andrew Garin, Emilie Jackson, Dmitri K. Koustas, and Carl McPherson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

The rise of freelance work in the online platform economy (OPE) has received considerable media and policy attention in recent years, but freelance work is by no means a new phenomenon. In this paper, we draw on IRS tax records to identify instances when ...

Information Reporting and Tax Compliance

By Bibek Adhikari, James Alm, and Timothy F. Harris

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Ensuring tax compliance is an enduring problem for governments in all countries. In this paper, we examine the role of information reporting in increasing tax compliance. We first discuss the practice of information reporting in the US, including a recent...

The Distinctive Values of Bankers

By Nava Ashraf, Oriana Bandiera, and Alexia Delfino

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

The banking sector is sometimes characterized by dysfunctional culture, but little is known about what values bankers hold. We gather data on employee values in a large multinational bank and measure alignment within the bank and with broader society. We ...

Visible Hands: Governance of Value Creation—Within Firms and Beyond

By Robert Gibbons

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Economic transactions can be divided into (1) those that are priced versus (2) those that are governed by visible hands, and within the latter (2a) those within a single organization versus (2b) those in nonintegrated settings. Nonintegration is not alway...

Tackling Climate Change Requires Organizational Purpose

By Rebecca Henderson and George Serafeim

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

The public debate about how to tackle climate change has been overwhelmingly dominated by the assumption that it can be solved through the adoption of an appropriate pricing regime. This paper argues that while the development of such a regime will be cri...

Measuring Collaboration in Modern Organizations

By Stephen Michael Impink, Andrea Prat, and Raffaella Sadun

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Internal communication has been a central theme in organizational economics, as employee collaboration provides insight into the structure of firms. Use of electronic communications data can be transformational for organizational economics, as these data ...

Knowledge, Stories, and Culture in Organizations

By Robert Gibbons and Laurence Prusak

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Organizations are full of stories; organizational economics, not so much. Rather, organizational economics has little work that conceptualizes the role or measures the incidence of stories in organizations. This shortage concerns us not only because stori...

Individual Identity and Organizational Identification: Evidence from a Field Experiment

By Maria Guadalupe, Zoe Kinias, and Florian Schloderer

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

This paper explores the relationship between individual identity and organizational attachment. Using individual data from employees at a large employer in the services sector, we show that making individual values salient (through a value affirmation) on...

Stories at Work

By Robert Akerlof, Niko Matouschek, and Luis Rayo

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Organizational stories are commonplace and a crucial force shaping employee behavior. We show how an organization's choice of story can be formally incorporated into its design problem. In our simple model, the organization optimally becomes either "purpo...

Can Mentoring Help Female Assistant Professors in Economics? An Evaluation by Randomized Trial

By Donna K. Ginther, Janet M. Currie, Francine D. Blau, and Rachel T. A. Croson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Women continue to be underrepresented in academic ranks in the economics profession. The Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession of the American Economic Association established the CeMENT mentoring workshop to support women in resear...

Employment and Earnings for Federal Government Economists: Empirical Evidence by Gender and Race

By Lucia Foster, Julia Manzella, Erika McEntarfer, and Danielle H. Sandler

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We contribute to the literature on diversity in the economics profession, which has mostly focused on academia, by providing a first look at the employment and earnings of federal government economists by gender and race. Combining micro-level data on fed...

Do Workers Comply with Salary History Bans? A Survey on Voluntary Disclosure, Adverse Selection, and Unraveling

By Amanda Agan, Bo Cowgill, and Laura Katherine Gee

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Salary history bans forbid employers from asking job candidates to disclose their salaries. However, applicants can still volunteer this information. Our theoretical model predicts that the effect of these laws varies by how workers comply. Our survey of ...

What Happens after an Abortion Denial? A Review of Results from the Turnaway Study

By Sarah Miller, Laura R. Wherry, and Diana Greene Foster

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We provide a brief overview of the Turnaway Study, the first study to collect longitudinal data on individual women who received versus were denied a wanted abortion in the United States. The study team collected data on nearly 1,000 women seeking an abor...

Legal Access to Reproductive Control Technology, Women's Education, and Earnings Approaching Retirement

By Jason M. Lindo, Mayra Pineda-Torres, David Pritchard, and Hedieh Tajali

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

What do historical changes in legal access to reproductive health care technology tell us about the long-run effects of such changes? We investigate this question using data from the Health and Retirement Study and an identification strategy leveraging va...

Local Economic Conditions and Fertility from the Great Depression through the Great Recession

By Jessamyn Schaller, Price Fishback, and Kelli Marquardt

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

This paper reexamines the association between local economic conditions and fertility using a new dataset of county-level birthrates and per capita income in the United States spanning the period 1937–2016. Using a panel data model, we estimate that gro...

Awards and the Gender Gap in Knowledge Contributions in STEM

By Jana Gallus and Emma Heikensten

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Organizations miss out if their smartest members do not bring their ideas to the table. Gallus and Heikensten (2019) establish that gender differences play an important role for female participation in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and ma...

Gender Differences in Scientific Communication and Their Impact on Grant Funding Decisions

By Julian Kolev, Yuly Fuentes-Medel, and Fiona Murray

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Why are women underrepresented in the fields of science, technology, and innovation? Using a sample of Gates and NIH grant applications submitted by a common pool of US-based academic researchers, we implement a range of text analysis methods associated w...

Inventor Gender and the Direction of Invention

By Rembrand Koning, Sampsa Samila, and John-Paul Ferguson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We study whether increasing the share of female inventors leads to more biomedical inventions that focus on the needs of women. After accounting for detailed disease-technology, disease-year, and technology-year fixed effects, we find that a 10 percentage...

Preventing the Spread of Antibiotic Resistance

By Jérôme Adda

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

This paper studies the spread of antibiotic resistance and its determinants, relying on unique data at state, year, bacteria, and drug level, covering all US states. I relate antibiotic resistance to the use of antibiotics in human prescription and animal...

Community-Based Crisis Response: Evidence from Sierra Leone's Ebola Outbreak

By Darin Christensen, Oeindrila Dube, Johannes Haushofer, Bilal Siddiqi, and Maarten Voors

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Postmortems on the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa suggest that effective community engagement helped slow transmission by encouraging people to come forward and be tested. We evaluate the impact of Community Care Centers: a new crisis response model...