Research

Publications

Economics Coauthorships in the Aftermath of MeToo

European Economic Review, Volume 176, 2025

We study changes in coauthorships in economics, after the MeToo movement, using NBER and CEPR working papers between January 2004 and December 2020. We identify three main shifts in collaboration patterns. First, compared to pre-MeToo levels, collaborations across genders in an author's seniority group increased: we estimate a 12.3\% increase of women coauthors per 100 men-authored papers. Second, coauthorship shares of senior with junior economics declined by 3.0%, indicating a shift towards sorting of collaborations by seniority. Third, shares of new coauthorships declined by 5.4%, driven by drops in senior economists’ shares of new junior and new junior women by 18.4\% and 48.0%, respectively. The results are robust to different specifications.

• Replication Package

• Media Coverage: VoxEU, VoxTalks Economics

• Preprint: CEPR Discussion Paper 18969

Working Papers

Is Affirmative Action in Employment Still Effective in the 21st Century? R&R at AEJ: Applied Economics

Online Appendix

This is a self-contained version of the paper including all appendices

Cambridge Working Paper Series No. 2262, CES Working Paper Series No. CES-22-54 

We reassess the most widespread employment-based affirmative action regulation in the US, Executive Order 11246, which increased representation of Black workers in the late 1900s. We find no positive impact of the regulation on the share of Black workers in firms regulated from 2001 to 2014. These results extend to other protected groups, as well as to earnings and worker flows. While firms entering regulation are positively selected, we show the regulation still has scope for continued impacts. Analyzing audited establishments, we find evidence of a disconnect between complying with the law as written versus implementing meaningful changes that impact workforce outcomes.

• Media Coverage: Yale ISPS

• Grants: Cambridge Humanities Research Grants, Keynes Fund

Human Capital Accumulation, Equilibrium Wage-Setting, and Gender Pay Gap Dynamics (Submitted on May 19, 2025)

We study how turnover and human capital dynamics shape the life-cycle gender pay gap when employers are forward-looking and able to set gender-specific wage rates. In our equilibrium wage-posting model with learning-by-doing and fertility events, the life-cycle gap can be attributed to worker productivity, job search, employers’ endogenous wage-setting, and job productivity. Estimating the model on NLSY79 data, we find that the high school and college gaps are driven by different forces, but employers' wage-setting accounts for one-third of the gap in both groups. Neglecting interactions between turnover and human capital dynamics biases down the estimated role of turnover substantially.

• This version subsumes "Human Capital Accumulation, Equilibrium Wage-Setting, and the Life-Cycle Gender Pay Gap", which was circulated via Cambridge Working Papers in Economics (No. 2010).

• Non-technical summary: Cambridge Economics alumni webinar series.

Nutritional Inequality: The Role of Prices, Income, and Preferences

In the U.S., lower income households have a less healthy consumption basket than higher income ones. This paper studies the drivers of such nutrition inequality. I use longitudinal home-scanner data to estimate a demand system on food products, and measure the contribution of disposable income for food, prices and preferences to nutrition inequality. Disposable income and preferences have a predominant and quantitatively similar role in explaining consumption basket differences across income groups. Instead, prices have a limited effect. Further, I merge nutritional label information to assess, through a series of counterfactual exercises, the effect of income subsidies on nutrition quality. For example, I show that increasing the budget of a low-income household to the average level of the higher income households (a 45% increase) leads to an increase in protein consumption of approximately 5% and a decrease in sugar consumption of approximately 10%.

• Grants: Keynes Fund

• Notes: Notes on the censoring problem and Lee and Pitt's (1986) approach

Work in Progress

Beyond Hot Flashes: The Economic and Health Implications of the Menopausal Transition

Women aged 40–60 are the fastest-growing segment of the UK labour force, yet for many this period coincides with the menopausal transition—an often-disruptive life stage that can alter employment, hours, and job retention. The impact of different menopause stages and symptom profiles on women’s labour market and broader outcomes, and the role of treatments such as hormone replacement therapy (HRT), is still poorly understood in a UK context. This project will provide the first rigorous UK estimates of stage-specific and symptom-specific effects on a wide range of women’s outcomes by moving beyond a uniform “pre/post” definition of menopause and instead modelling it as a staged and heterogeneous transition—perimenopause, final menstrual period, early and late postmenopause—accompanied by distinct clusters and intensities of symptoms. Using two longitudinal biomedical datasets rarely used in economics—EPIC-Norfolk, with repeated clinical measures and detailed work and health questionnaires, and UK Biobank, with national-scale phenotyping and linked health records—we will construct clinically meaningful transition stages and derive data-driven “symptom constellations” within each stage. We will then estimate their causal effects on women’s outcomes using modern difference-in-differences methods that accommodate staggered treatment timing and continuous treatment dose, while controlling for key confounders, HRT timing and type, and workplace context.

• Grants: Newton Trust, Keynes Fund

Can Customer Reviews Reduce Statistical Discrimination? Implications for Online Marketplaces

This paper investigates the impact of customer reviews on statistical discrimination in online rental markets. Extending the model of Laouenan and Rathelot (2022) to account for the informativeness of reviews, our preliminary observational analysis suggests that both the informativeness and quantity of reviews moderate the relationship between host ethnicity and market outcomes. However, as with any observational study, these findings may be confounded by systematic biases arising from racial differences in unobserved characteristics.

To address these limitations, we design a controlled experiment that systematically varies host race (using profile photos and names), review quantity (few vs. many), and review informativeness (vague vs. detailed). This experimental approach enables us to isolate the effect of statistical discrimination, assess the extent to which high-quality reviews can mitigate it, and determine whether any remaining disparities are attributable to taste-based discrimination. Together, these analyses enable us to disentangle statistical discrimination from racial differences in unobserved characteristics—a key challenge in the empirical study of discrimination.

Our findings will have direct implications for platform design, highlighting how review systems can be leveraged to reduce statistical discrimination in online marketplaces.

• The experiment has been pre-registered at the AEA RCT Registry, RCT-ID: AEARCTR-0015282. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.15282-1.0

• Grants: Keynes Fund, Cambridge Humanities Research Grants

• The draft is available upon request.

Fertility and the Gender Pay Gap

Building on Amano, Baron, Xiao (2025), in this paper we examine the impact of parental leave on the life-cycle gender wage gap in a setting where leave is unpaid and only a subset of workers retain job protection after childbirth–as is the case in the US.* To this end, we develop an equilibrium wage-posting model in which employers can influence the duration of workers’ parental leave through wage offers. Specifically, the probability that a worker returns to the same employer after parental leave depends on their pre-leave wage, allowing firms to shape retention incentives via wage-setting. The model distinguishes between fecund and non-fecund career stages, each with distinct turnover and wage-setting processes.

• The draft is available upon request.

Who Rides the New Research Waves in Economics?

Motivated by the gender and seniority specific impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on economists’ research productivity, this paper investigates how major shocks-including COVID-19, Brexit, the financial crisis, and the Paris Agreement, affect research output and coauthorship dynamics among academic economists. Using a unique dataset of 27,534 working papers from the CEPR and NBER series (2004–2021), supplemented by Covid Economics and VoxEU columns, we examine how different groups of economists respond to new research waves and how such shocks influence collaboration patterns.

Our preliminary analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic suggests that major shocks can exacerbate existing disparities in research participation and collaboration, particularly for women and early-career economists. Ongoing work extends this analysis to other shocks, providing further insight into how the profession adapts to disruptive events and the implications for diversity and inclusion in economics.

• This version subsumes "The Unequal Effects of COVID-19 on Economists’ Research Productivity", which was circulated via Cambridge Working Papers in Economics (No. 2038).

• The draft is available upon request.

• Media Coverage:  VoxEU, Nature, El Mundo, Cambridge Centre for International Research podcast, Society Byte, Le Monde, Times Higher Education

• Website: CAPER Project

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