Philip Ball in Nature:
The 2023 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences — the ‘economics Nobel’ — has been awarded to economic historian Claudia Goldin at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes”. Goldin’s work has helped to explain why women have been under-represented in the labour market for at least the past two centuries, and why even today they continue to earn less than men on average (by around 13%).
Although such inequalities are widely recognized, they present a puzzle for economic models because they represent not just a potential injustice, but also what economists call a market inefficiency. Women seem to be both under-utilized and under-incentivized in the labour force, even though those in high-income countries typically now have a higher educational level than do men. Goldin brought history to bear on this question through rigorous forensic analysis of how changes in women’s participation in the labour force have been influenced by social, political and technological change over the past two centuries. “The strength of her work comes from combining careful and innovative historical data with insights from economic theories of wage determination, employment, discrimination and the political economy,” says economist Claudia Olivetti at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.
More here.