Departmental Research Seminar

Sept. 5th, 2024

Post-COVID San Francisco: Temporary Shock or Doom Loop?

San Francisco faced two major challenges in 2020: a temporary decline in service industry jobs due to pandemic shutdowns, and a likely permanent shift to remote work that has reduced downtown economic activity. This talk examines four potential "doom loop" scenarios for the city, evaluating them against current evidence. It concludes with insights on the long-term impact of expanded remote work on San Francisco and the broader Bay Area.

Vertical Integration and Consumer Choice: Evidence from a Field Experiment

Many firms, from retailers to investment management companies, offer their own products alongside products sold by competitors. This form of vertical integration has been the target of regulation in digital markets based on concerns of harm to consumers. We study the effects of this practice on consumer choice in the context of Amazon.com. We run a field experiment using a custom browser extension that allows us to generate random variation in the set of products observable to consumers. The results are consistent with consumer preferences that prioritize low prices, high ratings, and fast delivery over other product characteristics, such as brand or seller reputation.

Bank Branch Access: Evidence from Geolocation Data*

We investigate whether unequal access explains why low-income and Black households use bank branches less than high-income and White households, despite relying on them more. We obtain a measure of access from a gravity model of consumer trips to bank branches, estimated using mobile device geolocation data. We find no evidence that low-income communities lack access, and instead find that lower demand for branch products or services explains their lower branch use. But in Black communities, poor access explains their entire drop-off in branch use. The results spotlight areas of the country to best target policies expanding access to banking.

Pulled Out or Pushed Out? Why So Many Men No Longer Work*

The fraction of men working in the United States has declined consistently since the 1950s. This has contributed to slower labor force growth and resulted in considerable gaps between labor force participation in the U.S. and its industrialized peers. In this paper we examine the drivers of this trend, focusing  specifically on prime-age men (aged 24-54). We compare non-participation rates across four generations -- the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Millenials -- and decompose generational gaps into "push" and "pull" factors. We define pull factors as those that draw men out of the labor force such as schooling or caretaking. Push factors are those that limit labor market opportunities, such as skill mismatch or disability. Our findings suggest that both pull and push factors are important with the most notable being skills mismatch, caretaking responsibilities, and prolonged continuing education. 

*The views in this paper are solely the responsibility of the authors and should not be interpreted as reflecting views of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco or the board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. 

"Culture and Competition: Independent versus interdependent framing alters preference for competition" 

Competition directly shapes the distribution of resources and rewards in modern societies. Preferences for competition, which often reflect dominant cultural norms, can therefore have outsized impacts on individual outcomes. We introduced two distinct cultural framings, highlighting either independent or interdependent models of agency, into a psychosocial training curriculum among women in peri-urban Vietnam. We show that women randomly assigned to the independent agency framing subsequently have stronger preferences for competition in an incentive-compatible lab experiment. A significant effect also remains after controlling for confidence and risk preference as potential mediators. We do not detect heterogeneous treatment effects.

Stereotype-Driven Gender Differences in Self-Promotion 

Gender differences in career advancement may be perpetuated by men using stronger adjectives and higher ratings to describe their professional skills, relative to women (the well-documented gender gap in "self-promotion"). This paper investigates a novel driver of the gender gap in self-promotion: stereotypes that men are perceived as more competent than women. I design an experiment to randomly assign participants in the role of workers to domains that vary in their stereotypical male advantage or stereotypical female advantage. Workers take knowledge tests in each domain and describe their test performance to employers in return for wages. Within male-typed domains, men self-promote 9.1 percentage points more than similarly-performing women, in line with prior literature. In female-typed domains, however, women self-promote 12.4 percentage points more than men with similar test performance. Further experiments reveal two mechanisms that create these stereotypical gender gaps in self-promotion: both men and women form higher beliefs about their performance, and interpret information about their performance more positively, in stereotypical domains.