Prof. Dr. Ana Fernandes

GirlTech -- This project aims to create a framework for interventions/experiments to identify whether technological attributes (in e.g. robots) result in differential levels of engagement between girls and boys. The experiments shall be carried out with pre-teens, possibly in schools. In particular, different interactions with robots (cooperation, competition, aesthetics) shall be investigated as to their influence in the degree of engagement of girls versus boys.

Gender Occupational Segregation in the Swiss Apprenticeship Market -- Gender occupational segregation is a known phenomenon in the labor market. We investigate whether employers contribute to this segregation by rejecting apprenticehips applicants whose gender differs from that of the typical worker. In collaboration with Prof. Dr. Martin Huber, University of Fribourg (Switzerland). Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Fertility Discrimination in Hiring in the German Speaking Labor Market -- In order to identify the effect of potential fertility and other child related costs on employers’ hiring decisions, a Correspondence Testing experiment is conducted. In the latter, résumés of applicants that are matched in all relevant qualifications, like schooling or job experience, but which differ with respect to their demographic characteristics, are sent out in response to job advertisements. Different response rates across candidates are considered discrimination. Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Reducing Work After Childbirth: A causal estimate of long-run lost income (with Debra Hevenstone) -- Using linked administrative data, we investigate the loss of income associated with fertility by comparing across individuals experiencing quasi-exogenous income shocks during pregnancy or shortly after the birth of the first child. This project is funded by a Spark grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (Debra Hevenstone is the leading researcher).

Due to conventional gender norms, women are more likely to be in charge of childcare than men. From an employer's perspective, in their fertile age they are also at “risk” of pregnancy. Both factors potentially affect hiring practices of firms. We conduct a large-scale correspondence test in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, sending out approx. 9000 job applications, varying job candidate's personal characteristics such as marital status and age of children. We find evidence that, for part-time jobs, married women with older kids, who likely finished their childbearing cycle and have more projectable childcare chores than women with very young kids, are at a significant advantage vis-à-vis other groups of women. At the same time, married, but childless applicants, who have a higher likelihood to become pregnant, are at a disadvantage compared to single, but childless applicants to part-time jobs. Such effects are not present for full-time jobs presumably because, by applying to these in contrast to part-time jobs, women signal that they have arranged for external childcare.

We investigate the role of financial constraints for product market competition in a general equilibrium model, where firms may differ in terms of own wealth and/or efficiency. We find that, in general, the amelioration of financial constraints increases competition (it lowers the Lerner index of markups) in financially dependent sectors even when other standard concentration indexes indicate otherwise. Our analysis implies that disruptions in financial markets – such as the recent financial crisis – may have adverse effects on competition in product markets, a cost that has not been identified before.

This paper presents a closed-form characterization of the allocation of resources in an overlapping generations model of two-sided, partial altruism. Three assumptions are made: (i) parents and children play Markov strategies, (ii) utility takes the CRRA form, and (iii) the income of children is stochastic but proportional to the saving of parents. In families where children are rich relative to their parents, saving rates—measured as a function of the family's total resources—are higher than when children are poor relative to their parents. Income redistribution from the old to the young, therefore, leads to an increase in aggregate saving.

This paper presents a model of familial altruism in which labor supply is chosen endogenously. The model is used to address the predictions of Ricardian Equivalence, both theoretical and empirical. It is argued that, to the extent that income variation in the data comes mostly from wage and effort changes, the empirical tests of neutrality are misspecified. Numerical estimates suggest that quantitatively important deviations from neutrality may be at work.

We test whether job insecurity of parents and children affect children’s moving-out decisions. Macroeconomic estimates for 13 European countries over 1983–2004 show that coresidence increases by 1.7 percentage points (PP) following a 10 PP rise in the share of youths perceiving their job to be insecure and declines by 1.1 PP following the same increment in insecurity for older workers. Microeconometric evidence for Italy in the mid-1990s shows that the probability of moving out increases by about half a percentage point for a one-standard-deviation increase in paternal insecurity and by one-third of a percentage point for a one-standard-deviation decrease in children’s insecurity.

In this paper, we propose a theoretical model to study the effect of income insecurity of parents and offspring on the child’s residential choice. Parents are partially altruistic toward their children and will provide financial help to an independent child when her income is low relative to the parents’. We find that children of more altruistic parents are more likely to become independent. However, first-order stochastic dominance (FOSD) shifts in the distribution of the child’s future income (or her parents’) have ambiguous effects on the child’s residential choice. Parental altruism is the very source of ambiguity in the results. If parents are selfish or the joint income distribution of parents and child places no mass on the region where transfers are provided, a FOSD shift in the distribution of the child’s (parents’) future income will reduce (raise) the child’s current income threshold for independence.

A difficulty with industrial policy regarding the uncertainty about infant industries' long-term potential. We argue that alternative commercial policy instruments may be associated with differences in the speed and accuracy with which the government learns about industry type.

In this paper, we investigate incentives, other than altruism, that developed countries have for improving developing country technologies. We propose a simple model of international trade between two regions, in which individuals have preferences over an inferior good and a luxury good. The poor region has a comparative advantage in the production of the inferior good. Even when costly adaptation of the technology to the poor region's characteristics is required—making the technology inappropriate for local use—there are parameter configurations for which the rich region has an incentive to incur this cost. It benefits from a terms-of-trade improvement and from greater specialization in the luxury good. Indeed, there are cases where the rich region would prefer to improve the poor region's technology for producing the inferior good rather than its own. We apply our model to the Green Revolution and provide a quantitative assessment of its welfare effects.

We present general recursive methods to handle environments where privately observed variables are linked over time. We show that incentive compatible contracts are implemented recursively with a threat keeping constraint in addition to the usual temporary incentive compatibility and promise keeping conditions.

Using an own survey on wage expectations among students at two Swiss institutions of higher education, we examine the wage expectations of our respondents along two main lines. First, we investigate the rationality of wage expectations by comparing average expected wages from our sample with those of similar graduates; further, we examine how our respondents revise their expectations when provided information about actual wages. Second, using causal mediation analysis, we test whether the consideration of a rich set of personal and professional controls, inclusive of preferences on family formation and number of children in addition to professional preferences, accounts for the difference in wage expectations across genders. Results suggest that both males and females overestimate their wages compared to actual ones and that males respond in an overconfident manner to information about realized wages. Personal mediators alone cannot explain the indirect effect of gender on wage expectations; however, when combined with professional mediators, this results in a quantitatively large reduction in the unexplained effect of gender on wage expectations. Nonetheless, a non-negligible and statistically significant direct (or unexplained) effect of gender on wage expectations remains in several, but not all specifications.

The apprenticeship market is the earliest possible entry point into the workforce in developed economies. Since early labor market shocks are likely magnified throughout professional life, avoiding mismatches between talent and occupations – for example due to gender- or status-based discrimination – appears crucial. This experimental study investigates the effects of applicant gender and its interaction with parental occupation on the probability of receiving an invitation to an interview in the Swiss apprenticeship labor market. We find no robust evidence of differential treatment by employers in most cases. Policies aimed at fostering gender equality across occupations should therefore focus on removing gender related educational or cultural barriers influencing occupational choices at young ages.