Research

This paper examines an employer-driven mechanism behind the early-career gender earnings gap using novel data on MIT graduates’ job offers and negotiation process. We document three key findings. First, women receive lower initial compensation offers than men within an employer-occupation. Second, this gap is entirely concentrated in non-salary components—signing bonus and equity—with no gap in base salary. Third, we find no gender differences in job search, and women negotiate as frequently and successfully as men. These findings also generalize to a national sample of high-skill workers in a dataset from Levels.fyi. To understand these patterns, we develop a model showing that a small number of discriminatory firms leads all firms in the market to lowball women in equilibrium. This market-wide gender gap is sustained through outside offers and cannot be closed by changes in worker behavior. We validate this mechanism using an incentivized resume evaluation experiment with recruiters, where we find that firms expect other firms to offer women less. Our results highlight the role of firm behavior—rather than worker decisions alone—in perpetuating gender pay disparities.

Can a credible ability signal to high-skill workers augment job search behavior and improve worker allocation across firms? We partner with a large online interviewing platform that screens workers for employers in the tech sector and identifies exceptional users as "one of the best-performing coders on the platform," communicates this fact to the worker, and subsequently offers them access to interview with select firms. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design around the exogenous performance threshold used to identify these users, we find evidence of increased and more ambitious job search as a result of the signal. Workers just above the threshold are 20pp more likely to switch jobs within a year, with effects concentrated among workers with less than 5 years of experience. Workers from lower-ranked universities who did not previously work at an elite firm see improved labor market outcomes 2-5 years after first using the platform—these workers are 21pp more likely to work at an elite tech firm and work at companies with 12% higher expected compensation. We find that more than 85% of job switches occur off-platform, suggesting that access to interviews on the platform did not mediate these effects. Instead, our findings are consistent with increased and more ambitious worker search after receiving a credible signal about their ability, particularly among groups that were previously less likely to have considered these opportunities. Our next steps include generating measures of worker self-confidence from self-assessment and video recordings of interviews and characterizing worker-firm match quality.

We conduct a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of educational attainment (EA) in a sample of ~3 million individuals and identify 3,952 approximately uncorrelated genome-wide-significant single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). A genome-wide polygenic predictor, or polygenic index (PGI), explains 12-16% of EA variance and contributes to risk prediction for ten diseases. Direct effects (i.e., controlling for parental PGIs) explain roughly half the PGI’s magnitude of association with EA and other phenotypes. The correlation between mate-pair PGIs is far too large to be consistent with phenotypic assortment alone, implying additional assortment on PGI-associated factors. In an additional GWAS of dominance deviations from the additive model, we identify no genome-wide-significant SNPs, and a separate X-chromosome additive GWAS identifies 57.

Companies have recently begun to sell a new service to patients considering in vitro fertilization: embryo selection based on polygenic scores (ESPS). These scores represent individualized predictions of health and other outcomes derived from genomewide association studies in adults to partially predict these outcomes. This article includes a discussion of many factors that lower the predictive power of polygenic scores in the context of embryo selection and quantifies these effects for a variety of clinical and nonclinical traits. Also discussed are potential unintended consequences of ESPS (including selecting for adverse traits, altering population demographics, exacerbating inequalities in society, and devaluing certain traits). Recommendations for the responsible communication about ESPS by practitioners are provided, and a call for a society-wide conversation about this technology is made.

Polygenic indexes (PGIs) are DNA-based predictors. Their value for research in many scientific disciplines is growing rapidly. As a resource for researchers, we used a consistent methodology to construct PGIs for 47 phenotypes in 11 datasets. To maximize the PGIs’ prediction accuracies, we constructed them using genome-wide association studies—some not previously published—from multiple data sources, including 23andMe and UK Biobank. We present a theoretical framework to help interpret analyses involving PGIs. A key insight is that a PGI can be understood as an unbiased but noisy measure of a latent variable we call the ‘additive SNP factor’. Regressions in which the true regressor is this factor but the PGI is used as its proxy therefore suffer from errors-in-variables bias. We derive an estimator that corrects for the bias, illustrate the correction, and make a Python tool for implementing it publicly available.

Long-term implantation of biomedical electronics into the human body enables advanced diagnostic and therapeutic functionalities. However, most long-term resident electronics devices require invasive procedures for implantation as well as a specialized receiver for communication. Here, a gastric resident electronic (GRE) system that leverages the anatomical space offered by the gastric environment to enable residence of an orally delivered platform of such devices within the human body is presented. The GRE is capable of directly interfacing with portable consumer personal electronics through Bluetooth, a widely adopted wireless protocol. In contrast to the passive day-long gastric residence achieved with prior ingestible electronics, advancement in multimaterial prototyping enables the GRE to reside in the hostile gastric environment for a maximum of 36 d and maintain ≈15 d of wireless electronics communications as evidenced by the studies in a porcine model. Indeed, the synergistic integration of reconfigurable gastric-residence structure, drug release modules, and wireless electronics could ultimately enable the next-generation remote diagnostic and automated therapeutic strategies.