Research

Working papers:

Do Second Chances Pay Off? Evidence from a Natural Experiment with Low-Achieving Students (2022)  (with Rigissa Megalokonomou & Stefania Simion) Older working paper version:  CESifo WP no.9620  IZA DP no. 15139
Conditinally accepted at Journal of Public Economics

In several countries, students who fail high-stakes exams at the end of high school are faced with the choice of retaking or forgoing postsecondary education. We explore exogenous variation generated by a policy that imposed a performance threshold for admission into postsecondary education in Greece to estimate the effect of retaking exams on academic performance and various measures of the quality of received offers. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design and novel administrative data, we find that low-achieving students who retake national exams improve their performance by around 0.6 standard deviation. We also find that they obtain higher quality postsecondary offers, thanks to improved performance and more ambitious re-application choices. 

The Consequences of #MeToo on Harassment and Inappropriate Behaviour in the Workplace (2023) (with Janne Tukiainen)  Submitted

The onset of #MeToo 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 harassment and inappropriate behaviour 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 decreases by 3.5pp after #MeToo. At the same time, we show that #MeToo did not impact the extent to which women observe general inappropriate behaviour relative to men.

Inequality in College Applications: Evidence from Three Continents (2023) (with Adam Altmejd; Andres Barrios Fernandez;  Jose Montalban Castilla; Martti Kaila; Rigissa Megalokonomou; Christopher Neilson; Sebastian Otero & Xiaoyang Ye)

This paper documents large gaps in the fields and in the quality of the college programs to which individuals from different gender and social groups apply in Brazil, Chile, China, Finland, Greece, Spain, and Sweden. These seven countries are different in size, economic development, culture, and geographic location. However, in all of them, universities select their students through centralized admissions. This feature of their higher education systems allows us to study differences in college applications conditioning on the most important factor that colleges use to select their students—i.e., students’ academic performance. We document a large and significant gender gap in preferences for fields of study. Even after conditioning on academic performance, women are between 20 and 40 percentage points less likely to apply to STEM degrees, and between 10 and 30 percentage points more likely to apply to health degrees. In addition, we find that conditional on application scores, individuals from household with low parental education apply to worse-quality college programs measured by peer test scores. Indeed, low-SES students at the top of the academic performance distribution apply to programs in which peer scores are between 0.05σ and 0.25σ lower than in the programs to which similarly talented students from high-SES households. Our results show that the gaps that we observe in college applications are not fully explained by institutional barriers or differences in applicants’ academic potential. Differences in applications across gender and social groups drive an important part of these gaps.

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: 

       The Impact of Firm Pay Transparency on the Gender Pay-Gap: Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Approach (with  Elias Einiö and Tuomo Virkola)

       Bargaining, Performance Pay and the Gender Wage-Gap (with Tuomas Pekkarinen)