Dana Scott

🚨 JOB MARKET PAPER ALERT! 🚨 Why do firms provide different workplace amenities? And how does amenity provision affect labor market inequality? 🧵

These findings suggest that we can’t simply regulate our way to a future with more women-friendly workplaces. Thinking about ways to reduce coordination costs is more likely to stick—but certainly a lot more challenging to imagine.

drive.google.comDS_JMP.pdf

Read the whole paper here. I'm on the market this year and looking forward to discussing this work!

🚨 JOB MARKET PAPER ALERT! 🚨 Why do firms provide different workplace amenities? And how does amenity provision affect labor market inequality? 🧵

On the firm side, I find that the productivity cost of flexibility varies sharply by skill level. High-skill occupations in competitive markets (e.g., finance jobs in Paris) face 2x the penalty of mid-skill jobs. This explains why high-paying jobs often bundle good wages with demanding schedules.

Using the model, I can ask what would happen if we required firms to provide a minimum level of flexibility. While this would increase amenity provision, it would *increase* the gender pay gap by 1.8pp because it would deepen gendered sorting across jobs.

🚨 JOB MARKET PAPER ALERT! 🚨 Why do firms provide different workplace amenities? And how does amenity provision affect labor market inequality? 🧵

On the labor supply side, I identify labor markets nonparametrically using E:E transitions, estimate rich substitution patterns across occupations and jobs, and recover job-specific labor supply elasticities WRT wages and amenities for men and women.

Women's higher WTP for flexibility (30% higher than men's) combined with lower labor supply elasticities (25% lower) creates a double burden. Preference differences explain 20% of the gender wage gap—a substantial share, but certainly not everything!

🚨 JOB MARKET PAPER ALERT! 🚨 Why do firms provide different workplace amenities? And how does amenity provision affect labor market inequality? 🧵

I document three empirical patterns: (1) flexibility co-varies within firms across establishments and occupations; (2) some flexibility dimensions correlate positively and others negatively with pay; and (3) women sort into jobs with better flexibility within occupations.

These suggest that there are important roles for both firms’ technological constraints and workers’ preferences. To explain these patterns, I estimate a model where firms choose wages and flexibility amenities subject to BOTH worker preferences AND productivity costs of providing the amenity.

🚨 JOB MARKET PAPER ALERT! 🚨 Why do firms provide different workplace amenities? And how does amenity provision affect labor market inequality? 🧵

Importantly, compensating differentials are *equilibrium* trade-offs between wages and amenities. Worker preferences are one side of the equation. But we know less about the firm’s side. With flexibility in particular, we might be concerned that flexibility may affect workers’ output productivity.

Studying amenities is hard in part because they are difficult to observe. I link French matched employer-employee data to large-scale surveys to observe a range of amenities related to workplace flexibility. This addresses the measurement challenge and helps us earn about firms' endogenous choices.

🚨 JOB MARKET PAPER ALERT! 🚨 Why do firms provide different workplace amenities? And how does amenity provision affect labor market inequality? 🧵

I study these questions by focusing on workplace flexibility—what Goldin (2014) defines as the “temporal aspects of work”: when, where, and how flexibly one works. Flexibility is especially important for gender inequality, because we know that women have a higher WTP for it than men do.

1 Apr 2025

Giving a lunch talk today and my April Fools bit is referring to it as my "job market paper" as if there is going to be a job market in the fall 🤪

10 Oct 2023

Suppose I have an instrument Z for some endogenous variable X. Z does a much better job predicting X for some X values than others. E.g. major better predicts occupation for nurses than for management consultants. What problems does this introduce? Is there a go-to reference for this issue?