Planet Money - Planet Money Paper Club

Starting point is 00:00:00 Just a heads up, this episode mentions the company LinkedIn, which has been a sponsor of NPR. This is Planet Money from NPR. We here at Planet Money read econ papers, a lot of them. A lot of them, because buried in those figures and charts and Greek lettery formulas are incredible observations about our world. Yes. And once you learn to read econ papers, it's like you've learned a secret code that unlocks all of these insights and explanations about why things work the way they do. Yeah. It's why we love econ papers. And we thought, you know how other people have book clubs? Well,

Starting point is 00:00:41 Planet Money should have an econ paper club. So we're going to try something new and very special today, a way to share some of the most fascinating, clever, surprising economics papers in a hopefully recurring segment we are calling the Econ Paper Club. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Kenny Malone. And I'm Erica Barris. And also, hello and welcome to the inaugural Planet Money Econ Paper Club. We're trying hard to make it work and make it work over and over. Today on the show, we read the econ papers so you don't have to. We're going to take you on a joyous romp through some fascinating ideas floating around economics right now.

Starting point is 00:01:37 Last year, thousands of school principals all got the exact same email from the exact same parents with the exact same subject line, which was school inquiry. Now, was this a real school inquiry? No. Were these real parents? No. Nope. It was some very clever economist running an experiment. Yeah. And that experiment, that is the subject of the first econ paper we're going to discuss for Econ Paper Club. And here, let us just explain how this like pretty fun, sneaky little experiment worked. Right. Okay. So all these principals were sent that email, school inquiry. Yeah. And then in the body of the email, it said, dear principal so-and-so, And then in the body of the email, it said, dear principal so-and-so, we are searching for schools for our child.

Starting point is 00:02:30 Can you call one of us to discuss? And then the email listed the names of these two parents. Parent number one, Roy, with Roy's phone number. Parent number two, Erica, with Erica's phone number. And if it's not clear yet where this study is going, the idea was to test which of these two parents, who are fictional, by the way, totally made up, which of them the schools would choose to call back. Right. Would the schools call the presumed mother, Erica, or the presumed father, Roy? And, you know, to be extra safe, the people running this experiment tried variations on the email as well. They switched up the names, the order of the names. Almost 6,000 schools got the email. 1,200 called back. And what this experiment found was that Erica, the mom in this fictional scenario, was

Starting point is 00:03:18 40% more likely to get that phone call. 40%. And I felt this study so much because I am often the primary contact for my child. And yet the school will completely ignore me when there's something to get in touch with me about. Just call my wife. And it's really gratifying to see actual numbers and actual data about this phenomenon. Another reason we love this study, it has an incredible Ghostbusters-inspired title, which is, quote, who are you going to call? Gender Inequality in External Demands for Parental Involvement. Incredible title. It's really good. And a funny thing happened when we tried to call one of the paper's authors. This was an economist at Tufts named Laura Gee. And when we first called, she apparently didn't recognize our phone number, but she later explained how she was in a very

Starting point is 00:04:13 relatable situation where she felt like she had to answer our unknown number. It's summer, so my child's at a camp. And I thought, oh, well, usually I don't like to pick up random phone calls, but it might be camp and I might need to go pick up my kid because something's gone wrong. So this study is like it's not unrelated to your life. No. This study is a study that was born of both my interest in labor markets as an economist and my interest in being angsty about always getting called instead of my male spouse. In fact, my husband is literally the vice president of my child's PTA at her school. Of course.

Starting point is 00:04:46 And I do not know why he does not get the first call when something is going wrong. This particular study, it was limited to two-parent heterosexual households. And it would be great to also see how this would play out with other kinds of households. Because, you know, who a school calls, it sounds like a small thing, but clearly Laura and the other authors were getting at something much bigger with their study. You know, this really has to affect the way that women and men interact with the workforce and the choices they make in a way that's not great for fully utilizing women as workers and being productive parts of the workforce.

Starting point is 00:05:26 Yeah, like those phone calls. They interrupt the workday and they are effectively telling the mom, you should be the one to come pick up the sick kid. And so the study is really looking at how one seemingly small thing in the world, an external expectation by other people, how even that might have a role in gender inequality. Okay, so the who you're going to call paper, the first paper of Econ Paper Club. But what will be the next paper of our paper club, Erica? Well, Kenny, we had an idea.

Starting point is 00:05:58 What if we do like a pay it forward recommendation chain? We're going to ask Laura what paper she really wants to talk about. I want to know what is a study that you are a fan of right now. So I am a huge fan of this paper by Yana Galin and Melanie Wasserman. Apologies if I have mispronounced anyone's name there. I don't know either of them very well. And it's called Informed Choices, Gender Gaps, and Career Advice. Okay. A paper from a similar area.

Starting point is 00:06:28 Yeah. So this is a recent study that is interested in whether or not gender affects the kind of career advice somebody gets. I think that's why this is so cool, is it's thinking about a step in the pipeline of career progression that I just hadn't actually thought very carefully about. But then as soon as they showed it to me, I can't not think about it anymore. Can't not think about? How people get pointed towards different kinds of careers according to gender. Yeah. And here is how this paper studied that. So the authors had real college students use their real accounts on a real online professional networking platform, which the authors do not say is LinkedIn, but certainly sounds like LinkedIn to me. I don't know what else it would be.

Starting point is 00:07:12 Totally, totally sounds like LinkedIn. And the detail we really love is that the authors wanted to keep the students' profiles as uniform as possible. the students' profiles as uniform as possible. So all these students had to make their, probably LinkedIn profiles, really basic, just like first name, last initial, college, major, that kind of stuff. And the best part, as the study explains,

Starting point is 00:07:37 quote, we provided students with the same photo of an iconic university building to use as a profile picture. Meaning they all had to replace their face with a picture of the same building. It's a super normal, super normal thing to do. And it means that it must have looked like the weirdest social media movement ever. Are these econ students pro this building, anti this building? No, no, no. It's just a sneaky study about career advice. That's what's happening. That's right. And these students all sent messages to professionals in a few fields like finance and law and data science, and they asked the

Starting point is 00:08:10 professionals from those fields about their jobs, how challenging they are, how rewarding they are, that kind of thing. And when the researchers collected all of the career information and advice that came back from the professionals, here is what they found. So when a student requesting advice had a traditionally female name, that person was considerably more likely to get advice like warning them about long hours or grueling career paths. The students with traditionally male-sounding names, those people did not hear nearly as much warning. In other words, men and women who are studying the exact same thing may get pointed towards different careers based on the assumption that the women will need more flexibility for family. And when Laura Gee, the economist who recommended this for Econ Paper Club,

Starting point is 00:09:03 read this study, it really, really struck a chord with her. Why did you pick this particular paper? Not only was I very impressed with it, just in terms of, you know, just the data and the analysis and the work that went into it, but it also made me change the way I behave in the world, which is not always true for when I read a paper.

Starting point is 00:09:22 Because, Laura says, she read that paper and thought, oh no, I am totally guilty of this too when I advise female students. And so Laura told us that she and her colleagues will now like check each other if maybe say a couple of professors are meeting with a student about a job search or something. Sometimes after collective meetings, we'll be like, hey, afterwards, I don't know if you noticed, but you kind of like pushed really hard on what that was going to be like for somebody who has children. And like, do we know that this person intends to have children or how they want to be involved in their child's life? And so, you know, we'll just sort of like take a

Starting point is 00:10:00 moment to be like, let's assess was that advice that we gave from our perspective without considering what the person who actually wanted? Laura told us that she didn't really know any of the authors on this career advice study. And so we asked her like, hey, is there anything that you would want to say to the authors? That I love this work. I think it is incredibly innovative and well done. And it's a really important problem. Thank you. I love your work too, Laura, if you're listening. This is Yana Galin, labor economist at the University of Chicago. She was co-author of that career advice paper.

Starting point is 00:10:38 And Yana says, looking back, she can totally see how this career advice stuff played out for her when she was looking for jobs and getting her own career advice. My husband is an economist, too. And when I was on the job market in most of the interviews, so you have like these 30 minute meetings with a bunch of different faculty kind of all day long. That's what the interview is. And I talked so much about child care availability and like how nice living in the city is and what the amenities are and not about economics. And I don't think that was the case for him. We talked about like, you know, oh, you're working on this and blah, blah, blah. Yana says it's complicated because obviously these kind of lifestyle things matter a lot when you're choosing a career. But also, undergrads don't necessarily know or care how much family or lifestyle is going to matter in 10 or 20 years.

Starting point is 00:11:35 Okay. So Yana's paper, that is Econ Paper Club Paper number two. And for our next paper, we wanted to keep this, you know, pay it forward recommendation chain going. So we asked Yana. What is a paper that you have read recently that you that you are loving right now? Yeah. So I love this paper by Ilyana Kuzyemko, Jessica Pan, Jenny Shen, and Abonya Washington called The Mommy Effect. Yes, The Mommy Effect. And to be clear, we told these economists they could recommend papers from any area of study. But hey, if the first edition of Econ Paper Club has a theme, so be it. Yeah, it's great. We get a glimpse of what some cutting-edge researchers are geeking out about.

Starting point is 00:12:22 And, you know, honestly, even though the paper Jana recommends here is called The Mommy Effect, it does get at this much bigger thing that may apply to anybody as they figure out their career path. So I think what's exciting about the paper is that they're highlighting, like, you know, there's a lot of dissonance here between, you know, what people expect and what they realize. And it seems like actually maybe their opinions change. Okay, so this paper's full name is The Mommy Effect, Do Women Anticipate the Employment Effects of Motherhood? It is a working paper that's been around for a few years now. Yep, all the papers we've mentioned here are working papers. That's how it works in economics.

Starting point is 00:13:03 Papers are presented at conferences and they can get press coverage before they're formally published. So this mommy effect paper that Jana wanted to talk about, it's what the researchers called a collage of empirical evidence, which basically means that they were taking all kinds of existing surveys, in this case from the US and the UK, and then layering those surveys together to ask all of that data a new question. And the question in this case was, when women think about having children, how accurately do they predict the impact on their career? I think it's a fantastic paper

Starting point is 00:13:37 because it's kind of the first one I know of that thinks about people as not really planning correctly or being able to plan accurately for this huge thing that happens in your life, which is like having a child, kind of a transformative experience. According to the paper, the thing people don't plan correctly for is parenthood, specifically motherhood. And also, anecdotally, very hard to plan for fatherhood, but that is not what this study is about. Not what it's about. It is specifically about motherhood. And the study found that women, especially educated women, don't anticipate the cost to come along with motherhood.

Starting point is 00:14:17 The many ways it's difficult to balance work and parenthood, as well as the literal cost of childcare. And so they wind up forming a more negative view of employment. And there are large and significant numbers of women who leave the workforce at that point in their careers. Women are 30 percentage points less likely to still be working within a year of having a child. Now, Jana is a labor economist, and she says that in labor economics, Now, Jana is a labor economist, and she says that in labor economics, they're constantly using statistical models to predict how people will act in different employment situations. And one of the reasons that she loves this paper is because she says the models just sort of assume that everybody's preferences are constant. But they're not. This paper shows that women may enter the labor market and then rearrange their priorities when they have a family. And Yana says that's the kind of thing

Starting point is 00:15:11 her field should probably take into account. How should we be modeling this huge life event that impacts your labor market earnings for a long time after the child is born doesn't seem to necessarily be anticipated. And that is not something that's in the models right now, but it might explain a lot of the labor market patterns that we have. So this is the place where we would call the author of the mommy effect paper and continue our little pay it forward paper recommendation chain. But when I reached out to one of the authors, she told me that she couldn't talk because she was dealing with a child who had hand, foot, and mouth disease. Of course. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:15:50 Very on theme for this episode. Yeah. It is a rite of parental passage. It is miserable. It also left us with a small problem, which is our econ paper club, like paper chain was broken. Erica and I were trying to figure out how would we find a final paper to talk about for this episode. And then as we looked back through the three papers we'd already talked about, we realized there was a final recommendation hidden in all of these papers. Everyone cites the work of the same economist. And that economist joins us after the break. Tell me who you are and what you do and how do you describe what you study? I am Claudia Golden. I am a professor of economics at Harvard University, and I am an economic historian. Claudia Golden is a legend, a first woman

Starting point is 00:16:55 tenured in economics at Harvard, former president of the big deal econ group, the American Economic Association. But you'll get a simpler answer when you ask Claudia to describe her work. I think of myself as a detective. There are lots of questions and I try to answer them. And some of those questions happen to have been about motherhood and the economy, which is why her work was cited in all of the papers we've talked about today. Now, Claudia has written so many papers that it is almost ridiculous to try and talk about just one, which is why in the inaugural Planet Money Econ Paper Club, we are already kind of cheating, because our final paper today is Claudia Golden's book. It's not a paper. It's a book. It's a book. It's a book.

Starting point is 00:17:45 And that book is called Career and Family, Women's Century-Long Journey Toward Equity. And in that book is this really useful idea that we wanted to talk with Claudia about, something that she calls greedy jobs. If you have jobs that are greedy jobs, part of that greediness is you are expected to go to Tokyo every other weekend or to go to Zurich every month to sign contracts, to do a handshake, to get to know someone, to look them in the eye.

Starting point is 00:18:20 Yeah, yeah. You know a greedy job when you see one. Yeah, yeah. You know a greedy job when you see one. A job that asks so much of you. It wants you to give it every part of your life, every hour, unpredictable schedule. And greedy jobs don't just take a lot of time. As Claudia describes them, they're jobs that incentivize more and more work.

Starting point is 00:18:42 So if you work twice as much, you're putting in all these hours, maybe you might earn 10 times more. And there are plenty of couples that start out as equals, plugging away at their own greedy jobs. Each of them has one. But Claudia says, if a child enters the picture, there is usually this moment where that couple stops, does the math, and realizes that it is going to be hard for both people to keep their greedy jobs. Claudia specifically studied how this has played out for lawyers. Notoriously greedy jobs. Right around the time children enter the picture, 2% of male lawyers go part-time,

Starting point is 00:19:14 2% leave the labor force altogether. Just 2%, only 2%, compared to 25% of lawyers who are women go part-time, and 16% leave the labor force altogether. And those decisions can have a huge impact. In law, going part-time could take someone off of the lucrative partner track completely. Yeah, but Claudia says it doesn't have to be this way. If you can take the greedy jobs and make them more flexible, and make them more flexible, then you will go some of the distance that would eradicate some of the gender wage gaps,

Starting point is 00:19:59 even if you still had many of the nasty social norms that surround us. Claudia says there are examples of less greedy but still lucrative jobs. And she likes to point to pharmacists for a bunch of reasons, really. Right. And one reason is that being a pharmacist is this specialized job where people are able to substitute easily for one another. They generally work as a team, taking shifts, swapping in and out, making themselves interchangeable. And when you look at pharmacist pay, you can see that when somebody does decide to go part-time, they aren't financially penalized like they would be in a greedy job. And when we were talking to Claudia about this, she said, of course you can make jobs more flexible. But overcoming the nasty social norms, her words, that's the more gradual process. There are many workplaces still in which,

Starting point is 00:20:50 and many families in which, switching gender roles is difficult. That the norm surrounding you, and this is exactly the paper that you began your journey with. Whom do you call? Because then that school nurse always calls the mother. You know, all the economists we talked to before Claudia, interestingly, they're each at that critical moment in life that Claudia has written so much about. Mid-career, young kids, figuring out what working with a family can look like. And when we started this paper recommendation chain, we really did say you can recommend papers about anything you want in any subject at all. And instead, all of these economists recommended papers that were grappling in some way with this really important and personal economic moment

Starting point is 00:21:45 when a career and a family collide. And you could feel how excited these women were, not just that this research is happening, but that it's about things they've experienced in their own lives. Yeah, totally. And you sort of get this sense of this next generation of economists gaining momentum, taking shape. And it's a generation that has been reading and inspired by Claudia Golden's research, literally citing it in their own research. And Claudia wanted us to know that she's been reading and inspired by their work as well. I think that the people whose work you're citing are in the trenches and they're doing incredibly good work. And I am very impressed and happy that they're doing it.

Starting point is 00:22:36 And I use their work. Today's show was produced by Sam Yellow Horse Kessler and James Sneed. It was edited by Molly Messick and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. It was engineered by Robert Rodriguez. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. Thank you to the co-authors and authors of the papers we talked about in this show. Christy Bazzard, Olya Stoddard, Melanie Wasserman, Ileana Kuziemko, Jessica Pan, Jenny Shen, and Ibania Washington. I'm Kenny Malone.

Starting point is 00:23:06 And I'm Erica Barris. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. And a special thanks to our funder the alfred p sloan foundation for helping to support this podcast

Planet Money - Planet Money Paper Club

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