Cultural Change through Writing Style: Gendered Pronoun Use in the Economics Profession, with Camilo García-Jimeno (Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago) • 2024

Abstract: Through their writing, people often reflect their values. Since the 1970s, academic economists have gradually changed their third-person pronoun choices, from using the masculine form to incorporating feminine and plural forms. We document this transition empirically, and examine the role of social interactions among economists in driving the cultural change reflected in these choices. Our analysis relies on a model where writing style depends on: i) the influence of academic peers, where authors may align with or oppose their peers' stylistic choices, ii) the implicit negotiation between co-authors, and iii) individual authors' preferences for expressing gender equality values in their writing. We directly measure peer influences relying on detailed time-varying information on academic connections between economists, and propose a methodology where, relying on a homophily-based model of co-authoring decisions, we can isolate the effect of peer influence from unobserved personal preferences. The model allows us to decompose the observed changes in writing style over the last 50 years into generational shifts, the increasing prevalence of co-authorship in the profession, the increasing share of female economists, and peer influence. Generational changes and the growing share of women in the profession play a minor role.Early on, the pace of change in writing styles was accelerated by the presence of contrarian economists moving away from their peer's behavior. The large fraction of conformists and the overall homophily in co-authoring, which restricts economists' exposure to peers with different gender-attitude signaling preferences, in contrast, slowed the adoption of innovative writing styles.

Mentorship and the Gender Gap in Academia, with Anders Kjelsrud (Oslo Metropolitan University) • December 2024

Abstract: This paper examines how the presence of female professors impacts graduates from top-50 U.S. economics PhD programs. Combining rich data on advisor-advisee relationships and career trajectories with a research design leveraging quasi-random sabbatical timing, we find gendered effects. The absence of a female professor decreases third-year female Ph.D. students' likelihood of publishing papers and securing academic positions. Conversely, male Ph.D. students in the same cohort benefit from this absence, seeing an increase in their publishing and placement prospects. These divergent outcomes can be explained by gender homophily in mentorship, with female students 51 percent more likely than male students to have a female advisor. One additional female senior professor in each top-50 economics department would close one-third of the gender gap in representation among assistant professors at top-25 schools.

Immigration and Innovation: Lessons from the the Quota Acts, with Petra Moser (NYU Stern) and Shmuel San (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) • Revision requested at Econometrica.

Abstract: In the 1920s, the United States introduced immigration quotas to limit arrivals from Eastern and Southern Europe (ESE). Intended to discourage low-skilled immigration, the quotas exempted scientists and students. We use biographical data on more than 80,000 American scientists to investigate the quotas' effects on innovation. These data show that the quotas discouraged ESE-born scientists from studying and working in the United States. To investigate effects on innovation, we use the world-wide universe of publications to identify research fields in which ESE-based science was prominent before the quotas. Difference-in-difference analyses show that, after the quotas, US innovation experienced a large and persistent decline in ESE fields. A decomposition exercise reveals that the quotas reduced innovation by lowering the productivity of incumbent scientists and by replacing immigrants with less productive natives. As US scientists produced fewer innovations in ESE fields, Canada gained relative to the United States.

Media coverage: New York Times, Washington Post, WSJ, Behavioral Scientist, and Marginal Revolution.

From Winning an Election to Political Engagement • 2020

Abstract: How do people react when the candidate they supported wins or loses an election? I explore the consequences of having supported a winning (or losing) candidate on future political participation. I begin by presenting two empirical patterns: 1) there is a positive relationship between county vote share to the winning party and future voter turnout in that county, 2) there is no significant change in the party composition of votes, suggesting that the increase in political participation percolates to voters of all persuasions. I provide evidence for a combination of an "individual" and a "community" effect to explain this joint pattern. While winning voters are "encouraged" by the win of their preferred candidate compared to losing voters, losing voters appear to be galvanized by being surrounded by winners. In the data, the two effects happen to balance, highlighting the significance of peer effects on voter participation.