Forthcoming from Princeton University Press in May 2024.
The announcement page is here.
You can pre-order it on Amazon here.
After publication the data files for the Statistical Appendix will be available here.
This is a list of research articles.
This paper, joint with Julia Hoefer, has just been issued as Discussion Paper number 17147 by the Centre for Economic Policy Research.
Abstract:
This paper explores the role of social norms in influencing the incidence of sexual assault, and the contribution of alcohol to such events. We build a decision theoretic model where agents may use alcohol as a “disinhibitor” to undermine social norms discouraging consensual sexual encounters outside marriage. This makes non-consensual encounters more likely. Stronger norms against consensual sex might therefore increase the incidence of non-consensual sex. We test the theory on data from US college campuses, using the presence of Planned Parenthood clinics in the county as an indicator of norms more accepting of consensual sex. Controlling for other factors, colleges in counties with fewer clinics have more incidents of rape and sexual assault in which alcohol is implicated. Colleges affiliated to the National Collegiate Athletic Association also have more such incidents, suggesting that sporting institutions also act as facilitators of a culture of sexual aggression. We provide suggestive evidence from attitudinal surveys and from campus religious affiliation that disapproval of consensual sex may indeed be involved. We explore rival explanations such as reporting and selection biases.
This paper, with Eva Raiber, Weiwei Ren, Jeanne Bovet and Charlotte Wang, has been accepted for publication by Economic Development and Cultural Change.
Abstract:
In many societies, parents are involved in selecting a spouse for their child, integrating this with decisions about premarital investment such as education. Do spousal preferences of parents and children conflict? We estimate parents’ spousal preferences based on survey choices between random profiles, elicited from parents or other relatives who actively search for a spouse on behalf of their adult child in Kunming, China. We simulate marriage outcomes based on preferences for age and education and compare them with patterns in the general population, and with preferences of a survey of students. The common concern that there may be aversion to highly-educated or high-earning wives is somewhat corroborated in parents’ preferences but not in students’ preferences, nor in outcomes, where homogamy is common and wives who are more educated than husbands are as common as husbands more educated than wives. Parents prefer wives younger than their husbands, yet most couples are the same age, an outcome consistent with student preferences. Overall, divergences between parental and child preferences exist, but are neither major nor very influential in explaining observed outcomes. Fears that highly educated women face diminished marriage prospects appear less serious than often claimed.
This paper, joint with Marie Lalanne, has now been published in The Journal of Institutional Economics, and you can find the link here. It’s worth noting that the paper has been significantly revised since earlier circulated versions, and in particular contains new results on homophily (both men and women derive more benefit from same-gender connections, and men have more of these than women do). Please cite only this version and not the earlier versions.
We investigate the impact of professional networks on men’s and women’s earnings, using a dataset of European and North American executives. The size of an individual’s network of influential former colleagues has a large positive association with remuneration, with an elasticity of around 21%. However, controlling for unobserved heterogeneity using various fixed effects as well as a placebo technique, we find that the real causal impact of networks is barely positive for men and significantly lower for women. We provide suggestive evidence indicating that the apparent discrimination against women is due to two factors: first, both men and women are helped more by own-gender than other-gender connections, and men have more of these than women do. Second, a subset of employers we identify as ‘female friendly firms’ recruit more women but reward networks less than other firms.
This is my new paper with Jérôme Gonnot which has just been issued as a CEPR Discussion paper (no. 15971), available here.
In the last few years I have undertaken a number of projects on individual decision-making under various influences – frames, nudges, narratives, channels of attention and group membership.
“Alcohol, Behavioral Norms and Sexual Violence on US College Campuses”, joint with Julia Hoefer, was issued on March 28th 2022 as a Discussion Paper by the CEPR.
The published papers from this line of work are:
“Betting on the Lord: Lotteries and Religiosity in Haiti”(with Emmanuelle Auriol, Diego Delissaint, Maleke Fourati and Pepita Miquel-Florensa), World Development 144 (2021), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2021.105441.
“Favoring your in-group can harm both them and you: ethnicity and public goods provision in China”, with César Mantilla, Ling Zhou, Charlotte Wang, Donghui Yang and Suping Shen, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 185 (2021) 211–233. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2021.02.016.
“Honest signalling in trust interactions: smiles rated as genuine induce trust and signal higher earnings opportunities”, with Samuele Centorrino, Elodie Djemai, Astrid Hopfensitz, Manfred Milinski, Evolution and Human Behavior 36(1), (2015), 8-16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2014.08.001.
“How Does Ranking Affect User Choice in Online Search?” (with Mark Glick, Greg Richards and Margarita Sapozhnikov), Review of Industrial Organization 45 (2014), 99–119. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11151-014-9435-y
I am currently working with Selon Goksel, PhD student at the London Business School, on a project involving the influence of narrative framing on the effectiveness of Bayesian updating. We expect to submit results for publication in April 2022.
I am working with Etienne Danchin, Guillaume Isabel, Arnaud Pocheville, Sabine Noebel and Ricardo Santiago on a project on the effect of social learning on individual decision making, financed by the CNRS. Further details can be found here and here.
I am also working with my PhD student Julia Hoefer on the effect of various treatments on the propensity of social media users to share fake news.
In the last few years I have undertaken a number of projects with co-authors Sylvie Borau, Jeanne Bovet, Guido Friebel, Marie Lalanne, Eva Raiber, Weiwei Ren, Peter Schwardmann and Charlotte Wang.
The published papers that have come out of this line of work are (the most recently published first):
What Do Parents Want? Parental Spousal Preferences in China, accepted for publication in Economic Development and Cultural Change, forthcoming 2023. Preprint available here.
“The old boy network: are the professional networks of females executives less effective than men’s for advancing their careers?”, joint with Marie Lalanne, Journal of Institutional Economics (2022), pp. 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1744137421000953.
“Gender Differences in Social Interactions”, joint with Guido Friebel, Marie Lalanne, Bernard Richter and Peter Schwardmann, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 186 (2021), 33-45, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2021.03.016.
“Parent-Offspring Conflict over Mate Choice: an experimental study in China”, joint with Jeanne Bovet, Eva Raiber, Weiwei Ren and Charlotte Wang, British Journal of Psychology (2018). doi:10.1111/bjop.12319.
“Honest signalling in trust interactions: smiles rated as genuine induce trust and signal higher earnings opportunities”, with Samuele Centorrino, Elodie Djemai, Astrid Hopfensitz, Manfred Milinski, Evolution and Human Behavior, 36(1), (2015), 8-16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2014.08.001.
“Do women have longer conversations? Telephone evidence of gendered communication strategies”, joint with Guido Friebel, Journal of Economic Psychology, 2011, doi:10.1016/j.joep.2010.12.008.
Working papers and those currently under submission include (not a complete list):
“Dating Choice and Career Choice: do the dating choices of ambitious women reinforce gender stereotypes in the labor market?”, with Jeanne Bovet and Sylvie Borau, under submission.
This paper, which is joint with Emmanuelle Auriol, Diego Delissaint, Maleke Fourati and Pepita Miguel-Florensa, is now published in World Development. You can download the paper here.
This paper, which is joint with Eva Raiber, was distributed in pre-print form in CovidEconomics, issue 61 from CEPR:
https://cepr.org/content/covid-economics-vetted-and-real-time-papers-0
You can download it here.
This paper, which is joint with Guido Friebel, Marie Lalanne, Bernard Richter and Peter Schwardmann, has been published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (2021). You can download it here.
An earlier paper with Guido Friebel, entitled “Do women have longer conversations? Telephone evidence of gendered communication strategies” and published in the Journal of Economic Psychology in 2011, is available here.