Lena Hensvik

NEW WORKING PAPER: 

Hensvik, L. and P. Nilsson (2025) Equality for Granted: What Happens When Discrimination in Academia Becomes Salient?, CEPR Discussion Paper 20210

We document the individual, organizational, and field-wide impacts following a public disclosure of substantial male bias in the competence assessments of newly minted PhDs applying for an important individual grant from the Swedish NIH. Post-disclosure, three key changes occurred: (i) a rapid phase-out of male-only review committees, (ii) adjustments in the decision-making processes of reviewers, and (iii) an elimination of the average male bias. We follow applicants’ publications, promotions, and earnings up to 18 years after application. We document an increase in the allocative efficiency of the research grants: the long-run research output of grantees assigned to review committees with an average pre-disclosure bias increased by 27 percent of a standard deviation compared to those assigned to unbiased committees. The disclosure of bias prompted coordinated actions with broader downstream academic and societal impact: female enrollment in biomedical PhD programs increased by 10 percentage points relative to other fields – in turn increasing female health focused research by 20 percent, without crowding out attention to men’s health. 

PUBLISHED AND FORTHCOMING WORK

Hensvik L. and O. Nordström Skans (2022), ”The Skill-Specific Impact of Past and Projected Occupational Decline”, Labour Economics 81:102326.

Azmat, G., Hensvik, L. and Rosenqvist, O. (2022) “Workplace Preseenteism, Job Substitutability and Gender Inequality”, Journal of Human Resources, 1121-12014R2.

Hensvik L., D. Müller and ON Skans, (2022) "Connecting the Young: High School Graduates' Matching to First jobs in Booms and Great Recessions", Economic Journal, 133.652 (2023): 1466-1509. 

Adermon, A. and Hensvik. L. (2022), "Gig-jobs: stepping stones or dead ends?", Labour Economics, 76 (2022):102171.

Eliason M, L Hensvik, F Kramarz and O N Skans, (2022) "Social Connections and the Sorting of Workers to Firms", Journal of Econometrics (2022).

Grönqvist E., Hensvik L. and Thoresson A. (2021) "Teacher Career Opportunities and School Quality", Labour Economics, 2021: 101997.

Hensvik L., Le Barbanchon T. and Rathelot, R. (2021) "Job Search During the COVID-19 Crisis", Journal of Public Economics, vol. 194 (2021): 104349

Hensvik L., and O. Rosenqvist, (2019), "Keeping the Production Line Running: Internal Substitution and Employee Absence", Journal of Human Resources 54.1 (2019): 200-224.

Fredriksson P., Hensvik L and O N Skans, (2018) "Mismatch of Talent? Evidence on Match Quality, Job Mobility and Entry Wages",  American Economic Review, vol 108, No. 11, November.

Hensvik L. and O N Skans (2016),"Social Networks, Employee Selection and Labor Market Outcomes", Journal of Labor Economics, volume 34, no. 4, pp 825-867 (Awarded the H. Gregg Lewis Prize for best paper in Journal of Labor Economics 2016-17).

Hensvik L. and O N Skans, (2014), "Networks and Youth Labor Market Entry", Nordic Economic Policy Review, Issue 1 pp. 81-117.

Hensvik L. (2014), "Manager Impartiality? Worker-Firm Matching and the Gender Wage Gap", Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Vol. 67, No. 2, April.

Åslund, O, Hensvik L and O N Skans (2014), "Seeking Similarity: How Immigrants and Natives Manage at the Labor Market", Journal of Labor Economics, Vol. 32, No. 3, July.

Hensvik L (2012), "Competition, Wages and Teacher Sorting: Lessons Learned from a Voucher Reform", Economic Journal, Vol. 122, Issue 561, pp.799-824. (Awarded the CESifo Prize in Employment and Social Protection)

WORKING PAPERS AND MANUSCRIPTS

Eliason M, L Hensvik, F Kramarz and O N Skans, (2017) "The Causal Impact of Social Connections on Firm's Outcomes", CEPR Discussion Paper DP12135.

Nilsson P and Hensvik L, "Businesses, Buddies and Babies: Social Ties and Fertility at Work", IFAU Working Paper 2010:9.

SELECTED WORK IN PROGRESS

Recommender systems and the labor market, with Thomas Le Barbanchon and Roland Rathelot (draft avaliable upon request)

Abstract: We explore how Artificial Intelligence can be leveraged to help frictional markets to clear. We design a collaborative-filtering machine-learning job recommender system that uses job seekers' click history to generate relevant personalized job recommendations. We deploy it at scale on the largest online job board in Sweden, and design a clustered two-sided randomized experiment to evaluate its impact on job search and labor-market outcomes. Combining platform data with unemployment and employment registers, we find that treated job seekers are more likely to click and apply to recommended jobs, and have 0.6\% higher employment within the 6 months following first exposure to recommendations. At the job-worker pair level, we document that recommending a vacancy to a job seeker increases the probability to work at this workplace by 5\%. Leveraging the two-sided vacancy-worker randomization or the market-level randomization, we find limited congestion effects.  We find that employment effects are larger for workers that are less-educated, unemployed, and have initially a large geographic scope of search, for jobs that are attached to several jobs, and are relatively older. Results also suggest that recommendations expanding the occupational scope yield higher effects. 

Women's Labor Market Opportunities and Equality in the Household, with Erik Grönqvist, Yoko Okuyama and Anna Thoresson, R&R at Journal of Public Economics (draft avaliable upon request)

Abstract: We examine how changes in couples' pay gap impact their division of childcare responsibilities. Theoretically, we expect that changes in parents’ comparative advantage should reallocate their childcare time, the degree to which depends on the substitutability of their time. Empirically, we exploit shifts in household relative wages stemming both from unpredicted female wage shocks and from a wage reform. A higher female relative wage reduces the childcare time gap, which is primarily driven by women’s reduced contribution. Importantly, traditional couples make smaller adjustments. Our findings emphasize that policies addressing female pay can foster household equality, contingent on prevailing gender attitudes.

Outside options and the sharing of match-specific rents, with Simon Ek, Peter Fredriksson and Oskar Skans (draft avaliable upon request)

Abstract: We estimate how workers’ capacity to extract rents from match-specific productivity relate to their outside options. Using a measure of match quality, derived from the relationship between workers' multidimensional skills and job-specific skill requirements, we show that: (i) wages within ongoing matches are much more closely aligned with match quality following an improvement of local labor market conditions; (ii) wages of job-to-job movers are positively related to the match quality in the previous job, even when controlling for current match quality and the previous wage. These findings are consistent with a framework where workers use counteroffers to extract rents from match-specific productivity.

Citations