| 1. |
- Altmejd, Adam, et al.
(författare)
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O Brother, Where Start Thou? Sibling Spillovers on College and Major Choice in Four Countries
- 2021
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Ingår i: Quarterly Journal of Economics. - : Oxford University Press. - 0033-5533 .- 1531-4650. ; 136:3, s. 1831-1886
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Family and social networks are widely believed to influence important life decisions, but causal identification of those effects is notoriously challenging. Using data from Chile, Croatia, Sweden, and the United States, we study within-family spillovers in college and major choice across a variety of national contexts. Exploiting college-specific admissions thresholds that directly affect older but not younger siblings’ college options, we show that in all four countries a meaningful portion of younger siblings follow their older sibling to the same college or college-major combination. Older siblings are followed regardless of whether their target and counterfactual options have large, small, or even negative differences in quality. Spillover effects disappear, however, if the older sibling drops out of college, suggesting that older siblings’ college experiences matter. That siblings influence important human capital investment decisions across such varied contexts suggests that our findings are not an artifact of particular institutional detail but a more generalizable description of human behavior. Causal links between the postsecondary paths of close peers may partly explain persistent college enrollment inequalities between social groups, and this suggests that interventions to improve college access may have multiplier effects.
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| 2. |
- Besley, Timothy, et al.
(författare)
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The Political Economics of Green Transitions
- 2023
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Ingår i: Quarterly Journal of Economics. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0033-5533 .- 1531-4650. ; 138:3, s. 1863-1906
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases may be almost impossible without a green transition-a substantial transformation of consumption and production patterns. To study such transitions, we propose a dynamic model, which differs from the common approach in economics in two ways. First, consumption patterns reflect not just changing prices and taxes, but changing values. Transitions of values and technologies create a dynamic complementarity that can help or hinder a green transition. Second, and unlike fictitious social planners, policy makers in democratic societies cannot commit to future policy paths, as they are subject to regular elections. We show that market failures and government failures can interact to prevent a welfare-increasing green transition from materializing or make an ongoing green transition too slow.
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| 3. |
- Christensen, Darin, et al.
(författare)
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BUILDING RESILIENT HEALTH SYSTEMS : EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE FROM SIERRA LEONE AND THE 2014 EBOLA OUTBREAK
- 2021
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Ingår i: Quarterly Journal of Economics. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0033-5533 .- 1531-4650. ; 136:2, s. 1145-1198
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Skepticism about the quality of health systems and their consequent underuse are thought to contribute to high rates of mortality in the developing world. The perceived quality of health services may be especially critical during epidemics, when people choose whether to cooperate with response efforts and front-line health workers. Can improving the perceived quality of health care promote community health and ultimately help to contain epidemics? We leverage a field experiment in Sierra Leone to answer this question in the context of the 2014 West African Ebola crisis. Two years before the outbreak, we randomly assigned two interventions to government-run health clinics-one focused on community monitoring, and the other conferred nonfinancial awards to clinic staff. Prior to the Ebola crisis, both interventions increased clinic utilization and patient satisfaction. Community monitoring additionally improved child health, leading to 38% fewer deaths of children under age five. Later, during the crisis, the interventions also increased reporting of Ebola cases by 62%, and community monitoring significantly reduced Ebola-related deaths. Evidence on mechanisms suggests that both interventions improved the perceived quality of health care, encouraging patients to report Ebola symptoms and receive medical care. Improvements in health outcomes under community monitoring suggest that these changes partly reflect a rise in the underlying quality of administered care. Overall, our results indicate that promoting accountability not only has the power to improve health systems during normal times, but can also make them more resilient to emergent crises.
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| 4. |
- Dahl, Gordon B., et al.
(författare)
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Does Integration Change Gender Attitudes? The Effect of Randomly Assigning Women to Traditionally Male Teams
- 2021
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Ingår i: Quarterly Journal of Economics. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0033-5533 .- 1531-4650. ; 136:2, s. 987-1030
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We examine whether integrating men and women in a traditionally male-dominated environment can change men's attitudes about mixed-gender productivity, gender roles, and gender identity. Our context is the military in Norway, where we randomly assigned female recruits to some squads but not others during boot camp. We find that living and working with women for eight weeks causes men to have more egalitarian attitudes. There is a 14 percentage point higher fraction of men who think mixed-gender teams perform as well or better than same-gender teams, an 8 percentage point increase in men who think household work should be shared equally, and a 14 percentage point increase in men who do not completely disavow feminine traits. Moreover, men in mixed-gender teams are more likely to choose military occupations immediately after boot camp that have a higher fraction of women in them. But these effects do not persist once treatment stops. Treated men’s attitudes converge to those of the controls in a six-month follow-up survey, and there is no long-term effect on choosing fields of study, occupations, or workplaces with a higher fraction of women after military service ends. Contrary to the predictions of many policy makers, we do not find that integrating women into squads hurt male recruits’ performance or satisfaction with service, either during boot camp or their subsequent military assignment. These findings provide evidence that even in a highly gender-skewed environment, gender stereotypes are malleable and can be altered by integrating members of the opposite sex. But they also suggest that without continuing intensive exposure, effects are unlikely to persist.
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| 5. |
- Folke, Olle, 1979-, et al.
(författare)
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Sexual Harassment and Gender Inequality in the Labor Market
- 2022
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Ingår i: Quarterly Journal of Economics. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0033-5533 .- 1531-4650. ; 137:4, s. 2163-2212
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We describe how sexual harassment contributes to sex segregation and pay inequality in the labor market. Combining nationally representative survey data and administrative data, we show that both harassment and wages vary strongly and systematically across workplaces. Women self-report more harassment from colleagues and managers in male-dominated workplaces where wages are relatively high, and men self-report more harassment in female-dominated workplaces where wages are low. These patterns imply two ways that harassment may contribute to gender inequality. First, harassment deters women and men from applying for jobs in workplaces where they are the gender minority. A survey experiment with hypothetical job choices supports this mechanism. Respondents are highly averse to accepting jobs in workplaces with a higher harassment risk for their own gender, but less averse when people of the opposite sex are at higher risk. A second way that harassment contributes to inequality is by making workplace gender minorities leave their workplaces for new jobs. An analysis of workplace transitions supports this mechanism. Women who self-report harassment are more likely to switch to new workplaces with more female colleagues and lower pay.
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| 6. |
- Hermo, Santiago, et al.
(författare)
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Labor Market Returns and the Evolution of Cognitive Skills : Theory and Evidence
- 2022
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Ingår i: Quarterly Journal of Economics. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0033-5533 .- 1531-4650. ; 137:4, s. 2309-2361
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- A large literature in cognitive science studies the puzzling “Flynn effect” of rising fluid intelligence (reasoning skill) in rich countries. We develop an economic model in which a cohort’s mix of skills is determined by different skills’ relative returns in the labor market and by the technology for producing skills. We estimate the model using administrative data from Sweden. Combining data from exams taken at military enlistment with earnings records from the tax register, we document an increase in the relative labor market return to logical reasoning skill as compared to vocabulary knowledge. The estimated model implies that changes in labor market returns explain 37% of the measured increase in reasoning skill, and can also explain the decline in knowledge. An original survey of parents, an analysis of trends in school curricula, and an analysis of occupational characteristics show evidence of increasing emphasis on reasoning as compared to knowledge.
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| 7. |
- Knutsson, Daniel, et al.
(författare)
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The Quality and Efficiency of Public and Private Firms : Evidence from Ambulance Services
- 2022
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Ingår i: Quarterly Journal of Economics. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0033-5533 .- 1531-4650.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Economic theory predicts that outsourcing public services to private firms reduces costs, but the effect on quality is ambiguous. We explore quality differences between publicly and privately owned ambulances in Stockholm County, Sweden, a setting where patients are as good as randomly assigned to ambulances with different ownership status. We find that private ambulances reduce costs and perform better on contracted measures such as response time, but perform worse on noncontracted measures such as mortality. In fact, a patient has a 1.4% higher risk of death within three years if a private ambulance is dispatched (in aggregate, 420 more deaths each year). We also present evidence of the mechanism at work, suggesting that private firms cut costs at the expense of ambulance staff quality.
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