We conducted a field study at a Swedish business school to investigate gender homophily in referrer behavior. In the study, 453 participants were asked to refer another student at the school for a real job. We find that both men and women mainly refer candidates of their own gender: 71% of female participants referred a female candidate, and 75% of male participants referred a male candidate. The gender composition of close friendship networks appears to be an important driver of this pattern. Randomizing participants across two job advertisements, we find suggestive evidence that the degree of gender homophily in job referrals is stronger when the job is more consistent with stereotypes associated with the participant's own gender.

Den här artikeln handlar om könsskillnader i jobbrekommendationer. Vi rapporterar resultat från en fältstudie vi utförde på en högskola i samarbete med ett företag. De deltagande studenterna ombads att först läsa en av företagets aktuella platsannonser och sedan tipsa om en annan student till jobbet. Majoriteten av deltagarna tipsade om en kandidat av sitt eget kön: 72 procent av de kvinnliga deltagarna rekommenderade en kvinna och 75 procent av de manliga deltagarna rekommenderade en man. Detta mönster kan delvis förklaras av könade vänskapsnätverk. Deltagarna hade mestadels nära vänner av det egna könet och många rekommenderade en nära vän till jobbet. 

In their study of relative income within US households, Bertrand et al. (2015, Quarterly Journal of Economics 130, 571–614) show that the distribution of the wife's share of household income drops sharply where the wife starts earning more than her husband. They attribute the drop to a gender norm prescribing that a wife's income should not exceed her husband's income. We document a similar drop in Swedish data. However, we also show that there is a spike where spouses earn exactly the same. Excluding the equal-earning spouses, the drop is small and mostly statistically insignificant. We conclude that, if anything, we find only weak evidence that Swedish couples comply with this gender norm.

Social rörlighet – eller rörlighet mellan generationer – är av stort intresse iden allmänna debatten och inom forskningen. Sociologer har länge studeratklassrörlighet mellan föräldrar ochbarn. Under de senaste decennierna harnationalekonomer bidragit till sådanforskning och särskilt med analyser avinkomströrlighet mellan generationer. Både sociologer och nationalekonomer har också studerat rörlighet i olikadimensioner av utbildning. Det finns därför en omfattande forskning om social eller intergenerationell rörlighet, som bör spridas till en bred publik. Två färska svenska exempel på rapporter somgår igenom forskning på området och vänder sig till en bredare publik är en bilaga till 2019 års Långtidsutredning, med titeln ”Utvecklingen av intergenerationell rörlighet i Sverige” (Brandénoch Nybom 2019) och en SNS-rapportmed titeln ”Social rörlighet” (Adermonm fl 2021a). Denna kommentar är motiverad av dessa rapporter.

I nummer 5 av årets Ekonomisk Debatt (Björklund m fl 2022) utgick vi fråntvå färska rapporter som för en bredare svensk publik presenterade ny forskning om social eller intergenerationell rörlighet. Vi tog tillfället i akt att diskutera hur vi ser på denna forskning och hur vi tycker forskningen bör utvecklas.Vårt inlägg vände sig både till aktiva forskare på området (inom olika discipliner) och till en bredare publik som intresserar sig för jämlikhetsfrågor.

Images of half-dressed women are ubiquitous in advertising and popular culture. Yet little is known about the potential impacts of such images on economic decision making. We randomize 648 participants of both genders to advertising images including either women in bikini or underwear, fully dressed women, or no women, and examine the effects on risk taking, willingness to compete and math performance in a lab experiment. We find no treatment effects on any outcome measure for women. For men, our results indicate that men take more risk after having been exposed to images of half-dressed women compared to no women.

Bertrand et al. (2015) show that in the U.S., the distribution of the wife’s share of household income drops sharply at the point where the wife starts to earn more than her husband. They attribute the drop to a gender identity norm prescribing that a wife’s income should not exceed her husband’s income. We document a similar sharp drop in Swedish administrative register data. However, we also show that there is a large spike in the distribution of the wife’s share of household income at the point where spouses earn exactly the same. The wives in the equal-earning couples do not have higher earnings potential than their husbands, suggesting that the spike is not generated by couples seeking to avoid that the wife earns more than her husband. Excluding the equal-earning couples, the drop is small and mostly statistically insignificant. We conclude that, if anything, we find only weak evidence that Swedish couples comply with a norm against wives earning more than their husbands.

This paper investigates gendered trends in income inequality in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, posing questions such as: Is the income dispersion higher or lower among men than among women? How do gender gaps in labor income and disposable income vary across time, countries and the income distribution? How do gender-specific aspects of income inequality contribute to the overall income inequality in a society?

Twenty-nine teams involving 61 analysts used the same data set to address the same research question: whether soccer referees are more likely to give red cards to dark-skin-toned players than to light-skin-toned players. Analytic approaches varied widely across the teams, and the estimated effect sizes ranged from 0.89 to 2.93 (Mdn = 1.31) in odds-ratio units. Twenty teams (69%) found a statistically significant positive effect, and 9 teams (31%) did not observe a significant relationship. Overall, the 29 different analyses used 21 unique combinations of covariates. Neither analysts’ prior beliefs about the effect of interest nor their level of expertise readily explained the variation in the outcomes of the analyses. Peer ratings of the quality of the analyses also did not account for the variability. These findings suggest that significant variation in the results of analyses of complex data may be difficult to avoid, even by experts with honest intentions. Crowdsourcing data analysis, a strategy in which numerous research teams are recruited to simultaneously investigate the same research question, makes transparent how defensible, yet subjective, analytic choices influence research results.