Publications

Working Paper
Goldin C. "Why Women Won". Working Paper. Publisher's Version
Goldin C, Avilova T. "What Did UWE Do for Economics?". Working Paper. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Economics is among the most popular undergraduate majors. However, even at the best research universities and liberal arts colleges men outnumber women by two to one, and overall there are about 2.5 males to every female economics major. The Undergraduate Women in Economics (UWE) Challenge was begun in 2015 for one year as a randomized controlled trial with 20 treatment and 68 control schools to evaluate the impact of light-touch interventions to recruit and retain female economics majors. Treatment schools received funding, guidance, and access to networking with other treatment schools to implement programs such as providing better information about the application of economics, exposing students to role models, and updating course content and pedagogy. Using 2001-2021 data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) on graduating BAs, we find that UWE was effective in increasing the fraction of female BAs who majored in economics relative to men in liberal arts colleges. Large universities did not show an impact of the treatment, although those that implemented their own RCTs showed moderate success in encouraging more women to major in economics. We speculate on the reasons for differential treatment impact.

Goldin C, Kerr SP, Olivetti C. When the Kids Grow Up: Women's Earnings and Employment across the Family Life Cycle. Working Paper.Abstract
Women earn less than men, and that is especially true of mothers relative to fathers. Much of the widening occurs after family formation when mothers reduce their hours of work. But what happens when the kids grow up? To answer that question, we estimate three earning gaps: the “motherhood penalty,” the “price of being female,” and the “fatherhood premium.” When added together these three produce the “parental gender gap,” defined as the difference in income between mothers and fathers. We estimate earnings gaps for two education groups (college graduates and high school graduates who did not complete college) using longitudinal data from the NLSY79 that tracks respondents from their twenties to their fifties. As the children grow up and as women work more hours, the motherhood penalty is greatly reduced, especially for the less-educated group. But fathers manage to expand their relative gains, particularly among college graduates. The parental gender gap in earnings remains substantial for both education groups.
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Goldin C, Katz LF. The Incubator of Human Capital: The NBER and the Rise of the Human Capital Paradigm. Working Paper. Publisher's VersionAbstract
The human capital construct is deep in the bones of economics and finds reference by many classical economists, even if they did not use the phrase. The term “human capital,” seldom mentioned in economics before the 1950s, increased starting in the 1960s and blossomed in the 1990s. The upsurge in NBER publications was even greater. Using EconLit codes from 1990 to 2019, the use of human capital among NBER books increased from 5% to 25%, whereas all economics books changed from 3% to 6%. For NBER working papers, 3% referenced human capital around 1990, but 10% have more recently. The figures for all economics articles are 4% and 6%. The NBER played an outsized role in the rise of the concept of human capital mainly because of the emphasis on empiricism at the NBER. We explore how the NBER was an incubator of human capital research and the ways human capital theory brought the NBER into the modern era of economics.
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Goldin C. How Japan and the US Can Reduce the Stress of Aging. Working Paper.Abstract

The Japanese are becoming older. Americans are also becoming older. Demographic stress in Japan, measured by the dependency ratio (DR), is currently about 0.64. In the immediate pre-WWII era it was even higher because Japan’s total fertility rate (TFR) was in the 4 to 5 range. As the TFR began to decline in the post-WWII era, the DR fell and hit a nadir of 0.44 in 1990. But further declining fertility and rising life expectancy caused the DR to shoot up after 1995.

In this short note I simulate the DR under various conditions and make comparisons with the US. Japan has experienced a large increase in its DR because its fertility rate is low, its people are long lived and it has little immigration. Fertility is the largest of the contributors in Japan. If there are no demographic changes in Japan, the DR will be 0.88 by 2050. I also assess the role of the “baby boom” of the late 1940s and show that it was compensatory, unlike that in the US. The good news is that healthier older longer-lived people will continue to be employed for many more years than previously and that is one way to reduce demographic stress.

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2022
Goldin C, Kerr SP, Olivetti C. When the Kids Grow Up: Women's Employment and Earnings across the Family Lifecycle. VOX Eu CEPR. 2022;(Oct. 7 2022). Publisher's Version
Goldin C. Understanding the Economic Impact of COVID-19 on Women. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. 2022;(Spring) :65-110. PDF
2021
Career & Family: Women's Century-Long Journey toward Equity
Goldin C. Career & Family: Women's Century-Long Journey toward Equity. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press; 2021.
Goldin C. Assessing Five Statements about the Economic Impact of COVID-19 on Women, in National Academy of Sciences, Societal Experts Action Network. Washington D.C. (online) ; 2021.
Goldin C. "How the Pandemic Could Make the Future Brighter for Women in the Workplace". Wall Street Journal. 2021. Publisher's Version
Goldin C, Kerr SP, Olivetti C. Data Extract Appendix to: "The Other Side of the Mountain," IFS Deaton Review of Inequalities. 2021. PDF
Goldin C, Kerr SP, Olivetti C. The Other Side of the Mountain: Women's Employment and Earnings over the Family Cycle. In: IFS Deaton Review of Inequalities. London, England: Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) ; 2021. PDF
Goldin C. "Journey across a Century of Women". Milken Institute Review. 2021;23 (2) :36-45. Publisher's Version
2020
Goldin C, Avilova T. What Can UWE Do for Economics?. In: Women in Economics. London: CEPR Press ; 2020. pp. 43-50. Publisher's Version
Autor D, Goldin C, Katz LF. Extending the Race between Education and Technology. American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings. 2020;110 (May) :347-51. Publisher's VersionAbstract
The race between education and technology provides a canonical framework that does a remarkable job of explaining US wage structure changes across the twentieth century. The framework involves secular increases in the demand for more-educated workers from skill-biased technological change, combined with variations in the supply of skills from changes in educational access. We expand the analysis backward and forward. The framework helps explain rising skill differentials in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries but needs to be augmented to illuminate the recent convexification of education returns and implied slowdown in the growth of the relative demand for college workers.
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Goldin C, Kerr SP, Olivetti C. Why Firms Offer Paid Parental Leave: An Exploratory Study. In: Paid Leave for Caregiving: Issues and Answers. Washington, D.C. Brookings Institution ; 2020. pp. 66-92. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Why do competitive firms in the US provide paid parental leave (PPL)? Which firms do and to what extent? We use several firm- and individual-level data sets to answer these questions. These include the BLS-Employee Benefit Survey (EBS) for 2010 to 2018 and an extensive firm-level data collection that we compiled. Our work is undergirded by a two-period model with competitive firms whose workers vary by their optimal firm-specific training and the probability that each will remain on the job after PPL is taken. We find that firm-provided PPL has greatly increased in the last two decades and generally covers new fathers. The levels of provision differ greatly by the industry, firm size, and the degree of firm-specific training. But even the top-of-the-line firm in the US provides fewer fully paid parental weeks than does the median OECD nation.

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2019
Goldin C, Lleras-Muney A. XX>XY?: The Changing Female Advantage in Life Expectancy. Journal of Health Economics. 2019.Abstract

Females live a lot longer than males in most parts of the world today. But that was not always the case. We ask when and why the female advantage emerged. We show that reductions in maternal mortality and fertility are only partial reasons. Rather, the sharp reduction in infectious disease in the early twentieth century played a role. Those who survive most infectious diseases carry a health burden that affects organs and impacts general well-being. We use newly collected data from Massachusetts containing information on cause of death since 1887 to show that females between the ages of 5 and 25 were disproportionately affected by infectious diseases. Both males and females lived longer as the burden of infectious disease fell, but women were more greatly impacted. Our explanation does not tell us precisely why women live longer than men, but it does help understand the timing of their relative increase.

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Alsan M, Goldin C. Watersheds in Child Mortality: The Role of Effective Water and Sewerage Infrastructure, 1880 to 1920. Journal of Political Economy. 2019;127 (2) :586-638.Abstract

We explore the first period of sustained decline in child mortality in the U.S. and provide estimates of the independent and combined effects of clean water and effective sewerage systems on under-five mortality. Our case is Massachusetts, 1880 to 1920, when authorities developed a sewerage and water district in the Boston area. We find the two interventions were complementary and together account for approximately one-third of the decline in log child mortality during the 41 years. Our findings are relevant to the developing world and suggest that a piecemeal approach to infrastructure investments is unlikely to significantly improve child health.

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2018
Women Working Longer: Increased Employment at Older Ages
Goldin C, Katz LF. Women Working Longer: Increased Employment at Older Ages. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press; 2018. Publisher's VersionAbstract
Today, more American women than ever before stay in the workforce into their sixties and seventies. This trend emerged in the 1980s, and has persisted during the past three decades, despite substantial changes in macroeconomic conditions. Why is this so? Today’s older American women work full-time jobs at greater rates than women in other developed countries.
            In Women Working Longer, editors Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz assemble new research that presents fresh insights on the phenomenon of working longer. Their findings suggest that education and work experience earlier in life are connected to women’s later-in-life work.  Other contributors to the volume investigate additional factors that may play a role in late-life labor supply, such as marital disruption, household finances, and access to retirement benefits.  A pioneering study of recent trends in older women’s labor force participation, this collection offers insights valuable to a wide array of social scientists, employers, and policy makers.
Goldin C, Katz LF. Women Working Longer: Facts and Some Explanations. In: Women Working Longer: Increased Employment at Older Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press ; 2018. pp. 11-54.Abstract

American women are working more, through their sixties and even into their seventies. Their increased participation at older ages started in the late 1980s before the turnaround in older men’s labor force participation and the economic downturns of the 2000s. The higher labor force participation of older women consists disproportionately of those working at full-time jobs. Increased labor force participation of women in their older ages is part of the general increase in cohort labor force participation. Cohort effects, in turn, are mainly a function of educational advances and greater prior work experience. But labor force participation rates of the most recent cohorts in their forties are less than those for previous cohorts. These factors may suggest that employment at older ages will stagnate or even decrease. But several other factors will be operating in an opposing direction and leads us to conclude that women are likely to continue to work even longer.

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