Working Papers

▸ The Role of Gene-Environment Interaction in the Gender Wage Gap

Abstract
After decades of narrowing, the gender wage gap has stagnated. Using administrative earnings records linked to the US Health and Retirement Study (1951-2020) and an index for genetic propensity to educational attainment as a time-invariant proxy for underlying skill, this paper traces 70 years of earnings for more than 10,000 individuals to disentangle age, cohort, and period components of gender differences in the returns to skill. In early cohorts, low-skill women were more likely to enter the labor market, although wage convergence was driven primarily by high-skill women. During the 1980s, high-skill women increased their labor-market participation, and continued to drive the gap convergence. After 1990 a reversal occurs: convergence is driven by low-skill women, who nearly reach wage parity with low-skill men, while returns to genetic potential for high-skill women flatten and then decline. The evidence shows that the post-1990 gender divergence in returns to skill is not due to occupational sorting but to within-occupation pay differences.

▸ Genetic Heterogeneity and the Child Penalty Gap

Presentations

▸ European Social Science Genetic Network (ESSGN) Conference
Erasmus University Rotterdam – May 30 – 31, 2024

▸ The Advances in Social Genomics Conference (TAGC)
University of Wisconsin – Madison – June 5 – 7, 2024

▸ Integrating Genetics and the Social Sciences Conference (IGSS)
Stanford University – October 24 – 25, 2024
Stanford University – October 8 – 9, 2025

Teaching

▸ Johns Hopkins University — International Economics I, MA in International Affairs (2024)

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