A personnel approach to firms and workers' behavior - with a focus on gender inequalities

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My research interests lie in the areas of labor and personnel economics, with a focus on understanding how labor market frictions affect workers' career trajectories and corporate behavior. In my work, I explore this topic from two distinct but interconnected angles. First, I am interested in studying the causes and consequences of gender inequalities in labor market outcomes, with an emphasis on the role played by gender attitudes in shaping gender gaps. Second, I study how labor market frictions constraining firms' hiring and wage-setting decisions affect corporate performance. During my one-year fellowship at the IFS, I envision to: (A) Advance and consolidate my current research projects: I have three projects that are at an advanced phase which would tremendously benefit from the one-year fellowship at the IFS. Indeed, the fellowship represents a unique opportunity to (1) gather and integrate feedback; (2) disseminate the policy-relevant results of these projects in the academic and policy arena, (3) submit the papers for publication to top peer-reviewed journals. In what follows, I summarize these projects:- "Daddy's girl: Daughters, managerial decisions, and gender inequality", studies the role of managers' gender attitudes in shaping gender inequality within the workplace. Using Danish registry data, we exploit the birth of a daughter as opposed to a son as a plausibly exogenous shock to male managers' gender attitudes and compare within-firm changes in women's labor outcomes depending on the manager's newborn gender. We find that women's relative earnings and employment increase following the birth of the manager's first daughter. This result highlights the importance of gender attitudes of key decision-makers in shaping gender inequality at the company level and has important policy implications for the design of interventions aimed at closing gender gaps in the workplace. - The second project, "Early exposure to entrepreneurship and the creation of female entrepreneurs" studies whether exposing young girls to entrepreneurship can help close gender gaps in this profession. By leveraging variation in parental occupation among schoolmates, the paper shows that belonging to a school cohort with a high incidence of entrepreneur parents increases boys' and girls' likelihood to become entrepreneurs during adulthood. However, early exposure to entrepreneurship has permanent effects only on women's occupational choices, reducing their likelihood to hold low-paid jobs and raising entry and tenure in entrepreneurship, and leads women to create businesses that are as successful as the average firm. This has important policy implications as it indicates that gender-specific barriers may be preventing successful entrepreneurs from ever entering the profession and that early exposure could lower such barriers for women with sector-specific talent.- The third project, "Recruiting difficulties and firm performance", studies how recruiting difficulties affect corporate performance. This problem has increasingly attracted the attention of both economists and policy-makers, as the ratio of job openings to hires has hit a record high following the Covid-19 pandemic. To answer this question, we leverage French data on the time it takes to fill a vacancy and find that an increase in recruiting time leads to a decrease in employment, investment, sales, and profits. (B) Consistently with the fellowship rules, I also plan to carry out further limited research (up to 25% of the programme of work) to start new projects related to my PhD. In particular, I intend to interact with researchers at the IFS whose interests overlap with mine to develop new collaborative research projects either focusing on gender inequalities in economic outcomes and/or on labor market frictions and vacancies.