The Hidden Rules of Ownership with Michael Heller
Economics Detective Radio
Michael Heller joins the podcast to discuss his new book, . This book explores the implicit social rules governing ownership. In brief, these rules are as follows: Attachment ("it's mine because it's connected to something of mine") Possession ("it's mine because I physically control it") First-in-time ("it's mine because I was here first") Labour ("it's mine because I worked for it") Self-ownership ("it's mine because it came from my body") Family ("it's mine because my grandfather left it to me") We discuss these six rules with reference to many examples of how they play out in the modern...
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The Wealth of Nations with Sarah Skwire
Economics Detective Radio
On today's episode, I discuss Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations with Sarah Skwire. Sarah is part of the team tweeting through the book . We discuss the project and talk through the first few chapters of the Wealth of Nations.
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The Kindness of Strangers with Michael McCullough
Economics Detective Radio
Today's guest is Michael McCullough of the University of California, San Diego. We are discussing his book . How did humans, a species of self-centered apes, come to care about others? Since Darwin, scientists have tried to answer this question using evolutionary theory. In The Kindness of Strangers, psychologist Michael E. McCullough shows why they have failed and offers a new explanation instead. From the moment nomadic humans first settled down until the aftermath of the Second World War, our species has confronted repeated crises that we could only survive by changing our behavior. As...
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The Gender Salary Ask Gap with Nina Roussille
Economics Detective Radio
Today's guest is of UC Berkeley and we discuss her working paper, . The gender ask gap measures the extent to which women ask for lower salaries than comparable men. This paper studies the role of the ask gap in generating wage inequality using novel data from Hired.com, a leading online recruitment platform for full time engineering jobs in the United States. 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 a bid salary they are willing to pay the candidate. If the candidate is hired,...
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Arts and Minds with Anton Howes
Economics Detective Radio
Anton Howes returns to the podcast to discuss his new book, . From its beginnings in a coffee house in the mid-eighteenth century, the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce has tried to improve British life in every way imaginable. It has sought to influence how Britons work, how they are educated, the music they listen to, the food they eat, the items in their homes, and even how they remember their own history. Arts and Minds is the remarkable story of an institution unlike any other—a society for the improvement of everything and anything. Drawing on...
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Science Fictions with Stuart Ritchie
Economics Detective Radio
Today's guest is , psychologist and author of . Science is how we understand the world. Yet failures in peer review and mistakes in statistics have rendered a shocking number of scientific studies useless – or, worse, badly misleading. Such errors have distorted our knowledge in fields as wide-ranging as medicine, physics, nutrition, education, genetics, economics, and the search for extraterrestrial life. As Science Fictions makes clear, the current system of research funding and publication not only fails to safeguard us from blunders but actively encourages bad science – with sometimes...
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Social Security and Wealth Inequality with Sylvain Catherine and Natasha Sarin
Economics Detective Radio
Today's guests are Sylvain Catherine and Natasha Sarin of the University of Pennsylvania. They discuss their research on wealth inequality, specifically with respect to social security's impact on calculated wealth inequality. When you account for the value of all future payroll taxes into Social Security and all future benefit payments from Social Security, the present value of that stream of payments accounts for a large fraction of the wealth held by the bottom 90% of households. Recent influential work finds large increases in inequality in the U.S., based on measures of wealth...
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BONUS: The Passion Economy
Economics Detective Radio
This bonus episode features an interview from , created by Adam Davidson of NPR's Planet Money. The clip features an interview with Coss Marte, an enterprising entrepreneur in an unorthodox business. The economy is bananas, even scary. But some people are thriving, and we're going to figure out how. Adam Davidson, "New Yorker" writer, longtime contributor to This American Life, and the creator of NPR’s "Planet Money," unearths stories from regular people. People who have cracked the code to success in our new economic reality.
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Angrynomics with Mark Blyth
Economics Detective Radio
Today's episode features my conversation with , co-author (with Eric Lonergan) of . Why are measures of stress and anxiety on the rise when economists and politicians tell us we have never had it so good? While statistics tell us that the vast majority of people are getting steadily richer, the world most of us experience day in and day out feels increasingly uncertain, unfair, and ever more expensive. In Angrynomics, Mark Blyth and Eric Lonergan explore the rising tide of anger, sometimes righteous and useful, sometimes destructive and ill-targeted, and propose radical new solutions for an...
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Free to Move with Ilya Somin
Economics Detective Radio
Ilya Somin of George Mason University joins the podcast to discuss his book . Ballot box voting is often considered the essence of political freedom. But, it has two major shortcomings: individual voters have little chance of making a difference, and they also face strong incentives to remain ignorant about the issues at stake. "Voting with your feet," however, avoids both of these pitfalls and offers a wider range of choices. In Free to Move, Ilya Somin explains how broadening opportunities for foot voting can greatly enhance political liberty for millions of people around the world. People...
info_outlineToday's guest is Nina Roussille of UC Berkeley and we discuss her working paper, The central role of the ask gap in gender pay inequality.
The gender ask gap measures the extent to which women ask for lower salaries than comparable men. This paper studies the role of the ask gap in generating wage inequality using novel data from Hired.com, a leading online recruitment platform for full time engineering jobs in the United States. 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 a bid salary they are willing to pay the candidate. If the candidate is hired, final salary is recorded. After adjusting for resume characteristics, the ask gap is 3.3%, the bid gap is 2.4% and the gap in final offers is 1.8%. Remarkably, further controlling for the ask salary explains all of the gender gaps in bid and final salary on the platform. To estimate the market-level effects of an increase in women’s ask salary, I exploit a sudden change in how candidates were prompted to provide their ask salary. For a subset of candidates, in mid-2018, the answer box used to solicit the ask salary went from an empty field to a pre-filled entry with the median salary on the platform for a similar candidate. Comparing candidates creating a profile before and after the feature change, I find that this change drove the ask gap and the bid gap to zero. In addition, women received the same number of bids before and after the change, suggesting they face little penalty for demanding wages comparable to men.
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During the conversation, Nina mentions Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. Among other things, encourages women to negotiate higher salaries, a strategy Nina's research would support.