Erin Hengel

Selected working papers

The golden leap: gender differences in the Matthew effect

with J. Doleac and M. Mohnen

Scientific recognition is not determined by merit alone. Eminent researchers benefit disproportionately from the Matthew effect, while women’s contributions are often overlooked, a phenomenon known as the Matilda effect. This paper is the first to examine how these forces interact. We exploit the timing of economists' first top-five journal publications—a salient status shock—to estimate its impact on citations to their earlier work. Male and female co-authors on the same top-five paper experience a significant citation boost following the top-five publication, consistent with a Matthew effect. Strikingly, the increase is larger for women, but only if their earlier work was less visible; when prior awareness is high, gender differences in the Matthew effect disappear. Guided by a model of the decision to cite, we show that this pattern is consistent with gendered differences in early-career visibility rather than differential strategic considerations—e.g., a desire to cite well-known authors. These findings suggest that status shocks can help correct the Matilda effect, and that gender citation gaps evolve as information about researchers and their work accumulates.

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Gender and the time cost of peer review

with D. Alexander, O. Gorelkina and R. Tol

In this paper, we investigate one factor that can directly contribute to—as well as indirectly shed light on the other causes of—the gender gap in academic publishing: time and length of peer review. Using detailed administrative data from an economics field journal, we find that referees spend longer reviewing female-authored papers, are slower to recommend accepting them, manuscripts by women go through more rounds of review and their authors spend longer revising them. Less disaggregated data from 32 economics and finance journals corroborate these results. We conclude by showing that all gender gaps decline—and eventually disappear—as the same referee reviews more papers. This pattern suggests novice referees initially statistically discriminate against female authors, but are less likely to do so as their information about and confidence in the peer review process improves. More generally, they also suggest that women may be particularly disadvantaged when evaluators are less familiar with the objectives and parameters of an assessment framework.

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Gender and equality in economics and finance journals

with E. Moon and R. Tol

Using (asinh) citations as a proxy for quality, we show that female-authored papers published in a wide array of economics and finance journals are, on average, higher quality than male-authored papers; however, we find no evidence that women's manuscripts are accepted at higher rates. Conditional on publishing in the very top journals, we also find that men's and women's papers are higher quality when they co-author with women instead of men: for example, the same senior male economist receives almost 80 log points more citations when he co-authors with a junior woman as opposed to a junior man. Under strong—but we believe reasonable—assumptions, we argue that these findings imply that economics and finance journals hold female-authored papers to higher standards and, consequently, do not publish the highest quality research. They also suggest that popular proxies of academic impact discount women's contributions, and that existing co-authoring relationships in economics under-exploit the capacity of female researchers.

Download the paper or read summaries in ProMarket.org and the Royal Economic Society July 2020 Newsletter.

One strike and you’re out!

with O. Gorelkina and I. Grypari

We investigate the impact a straight-ticket voting option—a.k.a. the Master Lever—has on U.S. senators' roll-call voting records in Congress. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we find the Master Lever leads to a 3–6 percent rightward shift in senators' policy positions. The effect is largely driven by the Republican party. To interpret our results, we analyse the Master Lever's impact on electoral incentives and outcomes. Our findings suggest that ballot design has a non-negligible impact on policy-making. They also imply that electoral outcomes in moderate to right-leaning Master Lever states may be especially vulnerable to right-wing, non-partisan voters.

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