This is a recurring event: View all events in the series “Research Seminar in Economics”
Speaker: Steven Bosworth (Reading)
Abstract
Evidence suggests that both in US and UK academic economics, more prestigious departments pay more and also have more male faculty.
We present a model of employer-employee matching which combines the Matthew Effect (the prestige of departments providing cumulative benefits to individual faculty) and the Larry [Summers] Effect (the tendency to misinterpret correlations and infer ability from identity) and focuses on the mutually reinforcing dynamics of prestige and biased beliefs due to imperfect information on individual ability (in this instance caused by long publication lags).
When departmental prestige is important and complementary to merit in the production of research, higher wages and discrimination towards the favoured group (men) are found at better- endowed institutions and having a greater proportion of male relative to female colleagues will be associated with an additional wage premium for both men and women.
We test this prediction of the model in an administrative panel of UK academics.
Looking at career trajectories of institution movers we find that the same person is paid more the more the department they move to is male- dominated and that this holds for both men and women, with a similar effect size (premium) of around 3%.
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