Publications:
Do Second Chances Pay Off? Evidence from a Natural Experiment with Low-Achieving Students (with Rigissa Megalokonomou & Stefania Simion) Journal of Public Economics 2024 (open access)
Previously circulated as IZA DP 15139 and Cesifo WP 9620 2022
Media Coverage (in Greek): news247 . gr , Καθημερινή , 'Εθνος, alfavita , Μένουμε Πρώτο, TV100 Μεσημέρια Κυριακής 23/12/24
Working papers:
The Consequences of #MeToo on Harassment and Inappropriate Behaviour in the Workplace (2023) (with Janne Tukiainen) (under review)
The #MeToo movement brought about an international reckoning regarding the incidence of sexual harassment and inappropriate behaviour. We evaluate the impact of the movement on employees in Finland using annual survey data on inappropriate behaviour and harassment on a panel of government offices. We document that prior to #MeToo women are 8pp more likely than men to both observe and experience general inappropriate behaviour. Using a diff-in-diff strategy we show that the female-biased gender gap in experiencing workplace harassment was reduced by 3.5p.p. after #MeToo. We also show that \#MeToo did not impact the gender gap in observing inappropriate behaviour in the workplace.
The Global Gender Gap in STEM Applications: Pipeline vs. Choice (2023) (with Isaac Ahimbisibwe; Adam Altmejd; Georgy Artemov; Andres Barrios Fernandez; Martti Kaila; Jin-Tan Liu; Rigissa Megalokonomou; Jose Montalban; Christopher Neilson; Jintao Sun; Sebastian Otero & Xiaoyang Ye) (submitted)
Women make up only 35% of global STEM graduates, a share unchanged for a decade. Using administrative data from ten centralized university admissions systems, we provide the first cross-national decomposition of the STEM gender gap into a pipeline gap (access and preparedness) and a choice gap (application decisions). The pipeline gap varies widely—from female disadvantage in Uganda to advantage in Sweden—yet the choice gap is strikingly consistent: even among top scorers, women are 25 percentage points less likely than men to apply to STEM. This stability across diverse contexts points to structural forces beyond local conditions.
Pay Transparency, Wage Setting and Worker Sorting (2024) (with Elias Einiö and Tuomo Virkola)
Pay transparency makes it harder for employers to arbitrarily discriminate when setting wages, but it can also reduce the firm's flexibility to reward or attract talent. To study these trade-offs, we take advantage of pay transparency legislation which mandated firms to report the wages of men and women in different job titles to their employees. We find that the policy led to a 0.07 p.p. increase in wages and wage compression within firms. The wage increase is driven by changes in worker composition and hiring by the firm, rather than changes in the firm's wage-setting or increases in separations. The wage compression within firms results from having fewer (lower paid) entrants relative to tenured incumbents. Controlling for worker sorting, we find the policy led to a reduction in the gender wage gap which is explained by increasing promotions to women and no change for men. We do not observe any negative effects on firm-level measures of productivity or worker morale. Our results do not support trade-offs of pay transparency on productivity, at least when pay transparency leads to gender wage-gap adjustments, but could suggest that firms become wary of having too much inequality at the workplace.
Job Tasks and the Gender Wage-Gap within Occupations (2019)
I provide evidence that task use at work by men and women in the same occupations is significantly different. The observed difference can account for the within-occupational gender-wage gap that is prevalent in many developed countries. Using data for thirteen European countries, I find that women consistently report spending less time than men on specific job tasks. The effect is exacerbated with fertility and selection into the labour force, however neither mechanism can completely account for the observed differences. The difference is also not accounted for by the type of occupations in which women are employed, nor their working hours and it is not driven by measurement error. Similarly to studies for the US and Australia, I find that a large portion of the gender wage-gap is found among individuals employed in the same occupational titles. However, controlling for both occupations and task use in a wage equation accounts for the entirety of the within-occupational gender wage-gap, for all countries in the sample.
Press Coverage: Frankfurter Allgemeine; The Daily Telegraph; LSE Business Review; Helsingin Sanomat
The Task and Skill Content of Occupational Transitions over the Business Cycle (2019) (with Rachel Forshaw)
We find that the change in the content of job-to-job transitions as measured by individual tasks and skill level is broadly similar within and outside of recessions. These results are in contrast to studies using occupation category as a proxy for job content and showing that the probability of changing occupation is pro-cylical. Our results suggest that factors related to individual and job characteristics are stronger predictors of skill reallocation than the business cycle.
Work-in-progress:
Under-Matching (with Rigissa Megalokonomou and Stefania Simion)
Education and Mental Health (with Cheti Nicoletti and Emma Tominey)