Economics Insights @ CBS

Although the gender wage gap in the U.S. has narrowed, women's career trajectories diverge from men's after the birth of children, suggesting a potential role for family-friendly policies. We provide new evidence on employer provision of these policies. Using the American Time Use Survey, we find that women are less likely than men to have access to any employer-provided paid leave and this differential is entirely explained by part-time status. Using the NLSY97, we find that young women are more likely to have access to specifically designated paid parental leave, even in part-time jobs.

In a sample of 110 countries over the period 1960–2009, we document a positive relation between the volatility and skewness of growth in the cross-section. This novel stylized fact is related to two distinct mechanisms: sudden growth spurts in emerging markets, and sharp financial crises-driven recessions in developed economies. The former phenomenon is driven by industrialization, macroeconomic stabilization, and the exploitation of natural resources. The latter is consistent with recent theories of financial frictions.

In a multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem a gambler needs to choose at each round of play one of K arms, each characterized by an unknown reward distribution. Reward realizations are only observed when an arm is selected, and the gambler's objective is to maximize cumulative expected earnings over some planning horizon of length T. To do this, the gambler needs to acquire information about arms (exploration) while simultaneously optimizing immediate rewards (exploitation). The gambler's policy is measured relative to a (static) oracle that knows the identity of the best arm a priori.

Koszegi and Rabin (2006, 2007) develop a model of expectations-based reference-dependent preferences, in which the agent experiences prospect-theory inspired "gain-loss utility" by comparing his actual consumption to all his previously expected consumption outcomes. Koszegi and Rabin (2009) generalize the static model to a dynamic setting by assuming that the agent experiences both contemporaneous gain-loss utility over present consumption and prospective gain-loss utility over changes in expectations about future consumption.

We examine economic consequences of US bank regulators' phased removal of the prudential filter for accumulated other comprehensive income for advanced approaches banks beginning on January 1, 2014. The primary effect of the AOCI filter is to exclude unrealized gains and losses on available-for-sale securities from banks' regulatory capital.