It is clear from research on corporate leadership that a glass ceiling prevents many women from occupying top executive or CEO positions.
In a recent article, we find that the glass ceiling is far more extensive than previous literature finds: women are not just excluded from top leadership positions, but rather they are excluded from nearly all top income positions regardless of occupation. We also find that progress on this front has been stalled for the last twenty years.
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Women pay a wage penalty when they become mothers, earning about five percent less than equally qualified childless women.
Five percent may not seem like much, but over the course of their lives, mothers will lose well over $100,000 in wages – money that could have been spent on a modest home, their children’s college education, or over ten years of groceries.
This is bad news for those who care about mothers, children, and families.
In a recent study, I asked whether the wage penalty had declined over the past few decades. Are mothers’ lives—at least in terms of their earnings—improving? Are we, in fact, witnessing a trend toward equality? The answers were, unfortunately, mixed. Some have done better, and others have done worse.
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Do business schools—and their products, MBAs—really matter?
Business school professors often lament that business education has no impact on the real world—that they waste their energy debating esoteric theories that nobody outside the academy pays attention to. But at the same time, business school critics claim that through excessive risk-taking and profit-maximizing at any cost, MBAs drove the economy into the financial crisis and the great recession a decade ago .
In a recent study, we examined how much business schools really matter. Does business school education really shape students’ minds and behaviors many years later, when they have reached top positions at major corporations and financial institutions?
We explore this question by looking at how CEOs engage in diversifying acquisitions over the last three decades. We chose to study corporate diversification because business professors dramatically changed their views about it during the period under study. This allows us to see how the business school curriculum impacted students.
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Research has demonstrated a dramatic rise of income inequality in the West. Today, across advanced capitalist countries, the top ten percent of households take home about a third of all income and own two-thirds of all wealth.
Despite what scholars, journalists and some politicians consider a worrying trend, there is no evidence that people have grown more concerned about inequality. In fact, citizens of more unequal societies are less concerned than those in egalitarian societies. How to make sense of this paradox?
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Recently, the United Nations’ Climate Change Conference in Poland, the U.S. National Climate Assessment Report, and severe forest fires, hurricanes and winter storms have called attention to just how devastating climate change already is and will continue to be. Yet, what these events often fail to highlight is who benefits from this devastation. Understanding that piece of the puzzle is critical for building better policy approaches to climate change.
One of the most tangible effects of climate change in the United States is the mounting cost and frequency of high-impact natural hazards. In 2018 alone, mudslides engulfed large segments of Montecito, Hurricane Florence flooded a large swath of the Carolinas, Hurricane Michael destroyed communities along the Gulf coast, and California experienced some of the most destructive wildfires in history. These are just some of the most widely known events. Hundreds of other natural hazards caused millions more in damage and loss of life across the country.
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R&D employees moving from one employer to another is a frequent, yet controversial event. On the one hand, inventor mobility has been shown to have a positive effect on overall innovative activity. On the aggregate level, the fast development of new technologies in regional clusters such as Silicon Valley is driven by dynamic labor markets and high turnover rates of engineers, programmers, or developers. On the firm-level, learning-by-hiring is a fast and efficient way to acquire external knowledge.
From the perspective a firm that loses key employees, outbound mobility, on the other hand, creates costs of finding suitable replacements and is associated with the risk of losing not only employees but also crucial knowledge. Knowledge that potentially is employed by the hiring firm to compete in related markets. Recent media coverage has revealed a number of lawsuits caused by one firm’s R&D employees moving to a competitor in industries ranging from semiconductors and mobile phones to pharmaceuticals and autonomous-driving vehicles.
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