The gender ask gap measures the extent to which women ask for lower salaries than comparable men. This paper studies its role in generating wage inequality, using novel data from an online recruitment platform for full-time engineering jobs: Hired.com. To use the platform, job candidates must post an ask salary, stating how much they want to make in their next job. Firms then apply to candidates by offering them a bid salary, solely based on the candidate's resume and ask salary. If the candidate is hired, a final salary is recorded. After adjusting for resume characteristics, the ask gap is 2.9%, the bid gap is 2.2%, and the final offer gap is 1.4%. Further controlling for the ask salary explains the entirety of the residual gender gaps in bid and final salaries.

Standard labor market models assume that workers hold accurate beliefs about the external wage distribution, and hence their outside options with other employers. We test this assumption by comparing German workers' beliefs about outside options with objective benchmarks. First, we find that workers wrongly anchor their beliefs about outside options on their current wage: workers that would experience a 10% wage change if switching to their outside option only expect a 1% change. Second, workers in low-paying firms underestimate wages elsewhere. Third, in response to information about the wages of similar workers, respondents correct their beliefs about their outside options and change their job search and wage negotiation intentions. Finally, we analyze the consequences of anchoring in a simple equilibrium model. In the model, anchored beliefs keep overly pessimistic workers stuck in low-wage jobs, which gives rise to monopsony power and labor market segmentation.

Gender gaps in education have closed in many parts of the world while gaps in employment remain wide open, even among college graduates. This paper asks why. We track the job search of 2,400 students graduating from two major universities in Pakistan — a country where two out of three college-educated women stay out of the labor force. We document that men and women begin with the same work aspirations, apply at the same time and at similar rates, and receive a comparable number of job offers. However, women are more likely to turn down these offers such that, six months post-graduation, the gender employment gap is 27 pp. Differences in the returns to application timing underpin this pattern: the likelihood of accepting an offer declines over time for women, not for men. This finding motivates our experiment, which financially incentivizes students to apply to jobs within a month of graduation. The intervention shifts applications earlier for both genders but raises employment for women only, reducing the gender employment gap by 34%. Treatment works on women who experience “the illusion of time”, i.e. those who underestimate how quickly external constraints—particularly from families and the marriage market— arise. By inducing these women to search before constraints bind, our intervention increases their chances of accepting a job offer.

We develop a procedure for adjudicating between models of firm wage-setting conduct. Using data from a U.S. job search platform, we propose a methodology to aggregate workers' choices over menus of jobs into rankings of firms' non-wage amenities. We use these estimates to formulate a test of conduct based on exclusion restrictions. Oligopsonistic models incorporating strategic interactions between firms and tailoring of wage offers to workers' outside options are rejected in favor of monopsonistic models featuring near-uniform markdowns. Misspecification has meaningful consequences: our preferred model predicts average markdowns of 19.5%, while others predict average markdowns as large as 26.6%.

This paper investigates how having more White coworkers influences the subsequent retention and promotion of Black women. Studying 9,037 new hires at a professional services firm, we first document large racial turnover and promotion gaps: even after controlling for observable characteristics, Black employees are 6.7 percentage points (32%) more likely to turn over within two years and 18.7 percentage points (26%) less likely to be promoted on time than their White counterparts. The largest turnover gap is between Black and White women, at 8.9 percentage points (51%). We argue that initial assignment to project teams is conditionally random, based on placebo tests and qualitative evidence. Under the assumption of conditional random assignment, we show that a one standard deviation (20.8 percentage points) increase in the share of White coworkers is associated with a 15.8 percentage point increase in turnover and an 11.5 percentage point decrease in promotion for Black women. We refer to these effects as intersectional: Black women are the only race-gender group whose turnover and promotion is negatively impacted by White coworkers. We explore potential causal pathways through which these peer effects may emerge: Black women who were initially assigned to Whiter teams are subsequently more likely to be labeled as low performers and report fewer billable hours, both of which are predictors of higher turnover and lower promotion for all employees. Our findings contribute to the literatures on peer effects, intersectionality, and the practice of managing race and gender inequality in organizations.

This paper studies how investors respond to tax evasion regulations in offshore financial centers. We do so by analyzing the 2005 EU Savings Tax Directive, which introduced a withholding tax on interest income earned by EU households in Switzerland and other offshore centers. Exploiting a unique combination of public administrative Swiss datasets, we find that the reform barely curbed tax evasion: 73% of the European offshore wealth in Switzerland remained both undeclared and untaxed by the time the Directive was repealed. We show that the limited scope of the Directive is mainly explained by tax evaders' active re-investment strategies in tax-exempt assets, as well as ownership transfer to sham corporations registered in tax havens. We rationalize the drivers of declarations by means of a model and document empirically that monetary incentives, such as the increase in the upfront tax in Switzerland or tax amnesties in the evader's home country, appear to be the driving force behind the rise of declarations. Conversely, bilateral information exchange treaties that were praised as a way to "end bank secrecy" have the least effect on declarations.