The fall of the aspirations wall
Incorpora video
The fall of the aspirations wall
How does one's' political-economic environment shape aspirations and choices? Decisions are generally made within a specific set of social norms, rules, values and world views. We study how, during the German Reunification, convergence with West Germany influenced the educational aspirations and eventual educational investments of students in the East.
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Alaura because as prepare to salamat tsunade's too dainty prego thank you very much Regina for this very nice introduction so today I'm gonna be talking about aspirations the goals of the Jung I'm gonna be talking about what shapes them and also what roles society or our political environment plays in shaping and forming those aspirations and of course what impacts these then have in the longer run but before I do that let me not go into the details and start with something very broad and then later zoom in so something which has been at the center of political policy and also academic debate in the last decades has been the existence and the persistence of gaps between groups of people so whether this is looking at gender or race or ethnicity we see that these gaps are there and persistent if you start to look across the income distribution and you start to compare across different socio-economic groups there we also see not only are these gaps in in income and in labor market outcomes but these are gaps which are getting bigger and relatedly when you look at intergenerational mobility this is something that has either been constant over time in many countries or in fact is something which is even decreasing now this is all very puzzling because there's a huge amount of effort that's gone into trying to achieve equality so let's take an example 1968 in the u.s. just after the Civil Rights Act is passed you find that the median family income of an African American family is 57% that of white fast forward 50 years and and what you find is that after 50 years of anti-discrimination legislation attempts to equalize across things like access to education we still see the same gap and so you can see here over time this has been something which has been relatively flat now similarly when we think about gender equality gender gaps in pay well this too is something that if you think about the amount of progress a gender equality has been and continues to be one of the most important global objectives of recent times and despite this we continue to see important gaps in the labor markets especially in things like income and even participation so then you start to go to what's asking well what is it I explained these gaps and as economists traditionally we've argued that actually a large part of these gaps we can explain them with supply-side choices in other words the choices that individuals make so whether this be the educational choices we make the occupational choices whether we choose to have children where we did reside these can explain a large parts of these gaps and the unexplained part we can assign them the residual part to demand-side explanation so this could be things like discrimination now there's something important missing in all of this and that's that the choices that we that we see being important in what we eventually find in a labor market have a route which is much less well understood in other words it's it's quite likely that the choices we see they're not truly reflecting desire or someone's aspirations that they may well be actually somewhat constrained perhaps even by the demand side so we make certain choices with with the consideration of what the demand side expects so this in a sense if we want to go further in trying to understand where these gaps in income and these gaps across individuals come from we need to in a sense think more about this constrained decision-making in other words why is it that individuals actually aspire towards what will hold them back why are there sort of consistencies across certain groups of individuals now I think before going any further one thing that I should do is actually define what I mean by aspirations and I think we can think of aspirations as being the desire to reach an attainable goal now that's to say that quite likely the aspirations that individuals have they're going to be grounded on some sorts of preference so for instance I liked economics when I was at school more than I liked history and therefore it's something I decided to pursue but it's also likely to be somewhat grounded on our expectations as well in other words I never aspired to being an astronaut because I thought most likely I'm not gonna make it and also I mean within these sorts of preferences and expectations we're also we have this goal-setting behavior and this may be something which is different across individuals in other words you make a bet against yourself and to achieve this bet to win this bet you may put in a certain amount of effort now these aspirations that we have it's quite unlikely that they're going to be falling from the sky most likely they are grounded on some things so they may be grounded on how we perceive ourselves our self-assessment the costs the benefits involves in trying to go and get those goals and achieve them but they're also likely to be grounded on our environment as well so the perceptions of others are likely to be as important I have other than the perceptions of ourselves so what I've been doing is I've been looking at his aspirations in a number of ways so I've been looking at aspirations at the individual level simply looking to see whether aspirations can explain things whether they are important in I was reaching certain positions reaching our goals then I look at this more broadly so society's role and how this may be playing a part in our aspiration formation and then finally how these aspirations can be if and if they can be changed and in a sense I think this is very relevant especially from the point of view of policy because if these are aspirations that can be altered in some ways it so calls for some type of policy intervention here so for today's talk I will be talking about each of these different aspects and I will provide empirical economic evidence for these different parts so let me start by talking about some work in which I've been looking at individual aspirations and their links with outcomes so this has been a focus of some recent works I work quite a lot on gender related inequalities and in this paper in the project in which we're looking at spur Asians we asked two main questions so we asked do early career aspirations play a role in your later outcomes and also does it help to explain gender gaps in top positions now this is something very important in the sense that we are seeing more and more gender equality in educational outcomes in - in fact actually now you see that the college attendance rank the university participation rate is actually higher amongst women than it is amongst men but we continue to see these big persistent gaps in the labor market and so it's somewhat puzzling why we have these sort of glass ceiling effects in the labor market and so in this paper we look at these two questions in the context of the legal profession in the u.s. now a little bit of background on that so the legal profession in the u.s. is one that has been expanding quite a lot and it expanded quite sizably in the 1980s and in its expansion it actually attracted a lot of women into the profession so for instance in 1980 you had around 22% of the profession comprising of women whereas today you have that almost 50% of those school graduates or women now despite the sorts of changes within and with respect to entry into the profession we find that there are actually still there are growing concerns about about earning differences as well as our promotion gaps among women in the profession so here just looking at the median median weekly earnings of women over and men over the last 20 years what you can see is that while there's been this slow increase in earning for both men and women over time there is a gap which has been persistent and this is the case even among women who are entering into the profession where there is gender equality in terms of the the cohort of women who are entering into the into the profession now what's interesting with all of this is that when you look at the differences between men and women in terms of their education well here I mean we are looking at one specific profession so we're looking at women in the legal profession men men and women in the legal profession so it's homogeneous in terms of it being a high skill profession so levels of education are the same but even beyond that I mean if you look at the the types of law schools that men and women go to there you have very similar sort of you you see that they go into very similar school so in terms of the ranking of the schools that they go to in terms of their GPAs in terms of their performance in law school again very similar across men and women that doesn't seem to be any strong gaps even when you see the sort of decisions they make early on in terms of where to go and work again very similar between men and women that doesn't seem to be strong differences but then as you look even early on in the career as lawyers earning gap starts to develop over time and further down the line these learning gaps are also then reflected in promotion gaps we're focusing actually on promotion per se and I think it's important because promotion is something which of course it's linked to wages it's the the two things often a promotion comes with some sort of pay increase but promotion actually reflects lots of other things it reflects power it reflects prestige it reflects a lot of responsibilities that you may have in the profession or even in the firm itself and of course it is related to the gender pay gap as well now when you look at the legal ladder the legal promotion ladder here are the numbers in terms of what goes on along this in this progression so a law school level you see parity now so 50% of women 50% of men in terms of law school completion there's a dropout rate of around 10% but even that it's very similar across men and women now going into the the profession and deciding where you want to work once you have your law school degree once you have your you've completed law school there you see around 65% of people decide to go into private law firms and once they're in private law firms they tend to be on this trajectory on this track in which they look to see if they can make partner within the firm eventually so here you see some small differences between men and women so 55 percent of men relative to 45 percent to women but even so again quite close but where the sort of striking difference comes is when you look at the top so around 10 years after being in entering into the profession you can start to see the the so promotion and there you could you see that at the partner level you have that well the chance of making partner for men and women so making partner is around fifty percent there is quite a big difference between men and women so while 80 percent of partners are men only twenty percent of those partners are women so we actually look at this and we we study we follow a track sorry we track a sample of lawyers they are nationally representative graduates from law school in 2000 and they attract several times over ten years and they were asked about a number of things including them being asked about what are your aspirations to making partner so the rest on a scale from one to ten how much do you aspire to making partner and what you find is again and this is relatively early in their career and what you find is that even early in their career there are sizable gender differences so around thirty percent of women have a low aspiration to making partner compared with only about twelve percent of men looking at the top of career aspirations you can see that again around 30% of women aspire to make partner compared with sixty percent of men so these are sizable differences now you may then ask well does this matter what you aspire at the beginning does it have any relevance for later on and the answer is yes because early aspirations are very very strongly linked to what happens later on so those who have low aspirations are less than 20% likely to make partner and those who have high aspirations are sixty percent likely to make partner and beyond this when we look to see the importance of this in explaining gender promotion gaps what we find is that these early career aspiration differences explain 50% of the promotion difference that you see between men and women so just to sort of give you some so some summary of the main sorts of findings that we have from the study well first of all we show that despite their being very similar so starting points for when men and women in the profession these gaps start to develop relatively early on once they were within the profession so aspirational gaps build up these promotion trajectories are also different for men and women and and these is aspiration gaps are explaining a large part of these differences that we later see in promotion now beyond doing this another thing that we do in the paper is we try to understand where these gaps are coming from so we try to understand how much of this is to do with a preference or desire how much of it is to do with your perceived probabilities about whether you're going to make it as partner or not and we also look to see whether it's the case that these preferences are these aspirations can be changed in any way and what we find actually is that they are that there is a important component in terms of how their work environment can impact aspirations so for instance one of the aspects that we looked at is very early on in their career they asked about whether on the basis of the agenda they experienced any sorts of demeaning remarks discriminatory comments on the on the basis of the agenda and what you find is that well 25 percent of women say that they experience these types of remarks only 6 percent of men do and more importantly these these differences these these experiences in the workplace then actually go on to impact aspirations and they're an important contributor to why some women may have lower aspirations then than other women within the profession it's a basis for that and I think in a sense what this kind of tells us is that aspirations can be somewhat shaped by our environment and here we're seeing that our work environment is playing an important role but then begs the question that well this may actually be it may be the case that your environment more generally that use society or your political environment can also be playing an important role and I think this then naturally takes me to the second part of my talk and this is looking at this broader implication looking at society role in changing aspirations so this is the basis of some work I'm doing with chair Regina touched on at the at the beginning and here we're asking three main questions we're asking do political regimes shape our goals and our aspirations can the environment also impact our attitude and also whether these changes in your aspirations and attitudes then feed back into our outcomes later on now for this paper unlike the the paper on the lawyers we're not focusing on young professional we're actually focusing on children were looking at adolescents and I think in a sense looking at children seems quite relevant since shaping the aspirations that are very young age seems to be something that's quite relevant for longer-term outcomes now the motivation for this project actually is that when you think about how aspirations may form your individual aspirations it's quite likely that they're not done in some sort of vacuum they're not done in isolation these aspirations are quite likely to be formed in a way which is in a context such as your your your community your society the the the political environment that you have welled views now but little is actually known about what these influences are on what impacts that they can have despite the fact that they will have potentially long run implicit implications now one of the reasons why it's difficult to look at this is because it's very challenging to actually separate what one's individual aspirations are from that of those around them so we we often will be within our community within our environment and it's very difficult to separate which part is coming from from which part but it's the objective of our paper and it's something that we were able to do given our context so we are able to causally look at changes in one's socio-economic environment and see how this affects individual aspirations and also to see if this then has any longer run impacts and we're focusing here in the domain of education now the second objective is to then delve into the mechanism so try to understand if aspirations are changing what is it that is is impacting those aspirations and here we return to a very classic education model which says that there there tend to be three important components in determining our choice of education the first is that we choose education on the basis of what we expect to get out of it in terms of the returns in terms of our earnings so the expected returns to education from our degree for example the perceived uncertainty of this decision so how uncertain is it if I make this choice in education for my later results my later outcome and also your preferences so this could be your consumption preferences could be something which is then driving your decision about how much education to have so the setting that we use is a very solve it's an important setting and this is the German reunification which took place in October 1990 and it's one of the most important structural political changes that we've seen in recent history and this is because we see a convergence of East Germany to West Germany now just to give a little recap I think Regina talks about this very nicely but let me talk a bit about the context so until the end I think this is another fall of the wall that was planned so until the end of World War two Germany was a single country after the Second World War it was split between the Soviets where you see East Germany and the West and the the u.s. France and the UK so 1945 49 soon again in 1949 a border is formed between East Germany and West Germany and eventually in the early sixties you see this of the the Berlin wall being erected and in a sense this is a very symbolic change because it represents in a sense this changed this division between the East and West that has been there actually even for some time but what's kind of important within all of this is that East Germany developed under a communist regime now it wasn't obvious to everyone that this 40 years down the line that this wall was actually gonna disappear at some point so you have this quote from the head of the GDR in January 1989 in which he says that this wall will be standing in fifty or even a hundred years now we know with this historic moment in in November 8 1989 in which this the there was the fall of the Berlin Wall and in a sense this fall then led to a chain of events following it now it's not the first wall that we've seen in history they've been other Wars like the Hadrian war the Great Wall of China unfortunately it may not even be the last wall that we're gonna see in history so there may be more to come but going back to Germany so the convergence to the West now following the fall of the Berlin Wall we see that Germany reunified and I think this was very special because well the the the Iron Curtain was was was rising of in many countries while many countries were actually forming countries of their own here what you have is that East Germany decided that there was there would be this reunification with the West and not only a reunification but a convergence a convergence to the political and the economic system of the West now in terms of Education so what was going on with education between the East and the west over this time well actually access to go into higher education was actually very similar in the east and west so the was the way in which an individual would go so University would be by completing the aperture and this is a two-year secondary school certificate which would give you access to University and this was the case before and after reunification and it was the same in the Eastern and in the West but where there were big differences were in things like university participation so while 40 percent of students in the West were going to university only 20 percent of students in the East were going to university now the other major difference was in terms of the returns to university so for someone who went to university in the east they could expect an average sort of increase in their income relative to someone who didn't go to university or someone who was a blue-collar worker by around 15% compared with someone who was in the West where the increase there was 70% so much bigger returns to education a return to your college education than what it was or in the East so let me tell you a little about our studying the data that we're using is that where we're looking at were following two distinct cohorts of students were three years apart in age and they surveyed over several years before and after reunification and the older cohort who are three years older you first see them when they're in grade six and the younger cohort you see them when they're in Grade three so twelve years old and nine years old now the variables that were interested in looking at are first of all that the students are asked repeatedly over the years how much they aspire whether they aspire to going to university in other words to attain the arbiter and then we're looking at some other important variables so we're looking at the actual outcome so whether these guys actually do go to university or not and then there were the sorts of dimensions that we focus on like their socio-economic preferences and also the psychological well-being and I'll come to this a little later but what's important is the timing so they're asked about this over time including in this small interval just before and just after reunification now in terms of measuring the effect of reunification on aspirations what we do is we analyze the effect that this has on the younger cohort the the younger the cohort within our sample and we compare them to the older cohort at the same grade now why do we do that well that's because what the older cohort allow us to do is it allows us to use them as a counterfactual trend in other words it tells us what would have happened in terms of their educational aspirations and outcomes had reunification not happened so to be a little bit more precise on this this is kind of how the timeline looked for the two cohorts so reunification happened in 1990 when the younger cohorts were in grade 8 and the older cohorts were in year 11 now we're not looking and comparing the grey dates with the grade 11s instead what we're doing is we're comparing the grey dates from the younger cohort with the older cohort when they were in grade 8 and why this is important is because when the older cohorts were in grade 8 it was 1988 they were 14 years old and it was pre unification the younger cohort when they are in grade 8 also 14 years old it's 1991 and this is post reunification but we can still use these similarities in their age and they're great to see what the effects of reunification has been on top of that we're looking at this very narrow interval so we're comparing them just before and just after reunification happens so here we have our treated our group which is the younger cohort in which were looking at the aspiration change and the control group where this is the older cohort and they give us some idea of what would have happened had there not been reunification and we use this difference in difference design so just to give you an idea of what actually then happened so here this is the older cohort so this is all pre unification time and you can see that when they're asked do you aspire to obtain the arbiter so to go to university when they're in grade six there's around forty percent of them who say that they do but then you can see that this starts to fall and by the time they're in year nine this goes down to around twenty percent so in much lower and you see that in a sense this is something that we do observe in general that as children get older their aspirations for whether they're going to go to university actually do start to decline and this is because you get a better idea of yourself you've got a better idea perhaps through information on your grades on where the university is well matched to you so it's something that has been shown in other studies as well but what's very interesting is if you then look at the younger cohort and you can see that in the pre urine reunification period also they're following this all downward trend in terms of their aspiration but following reunification when they're in year eight there's this big jump up in terms of aspirations and this when you put the two things together so comparing the older and the younger cohort at the same grade there is a 57 percent difference so fifty-seven percent more students in the younger cohort are aspiring to do the abotu so in the preview nough fication period we see that there are no differences in the post reunification period we see that there are these sizable differences and these results are still there when we control for important individual specific characteristics even information on their families and these results are still kind of holding beyond that so then the next thing to turn to is well what are the longer-run impacts disease do these aspirations translate into anything does they have an impact in terms of when we see that this regime has changed does they have an impact on what students actually do okay and for this what we can do is we can follow these individuals when they're 18 years old so once they've made their decision about whether they're going to do the abotu and complete the aperture using their aspirations earlier on and for this we have three main hypotheses the first is that very simply that our hypothesis is that aspirations predict attainment and otherwise there is this link of what you kind of aspire very early on to what you actually do later and that in grade 8 there are closer they're a better predictor than in grade 7 partly because you see that these these aspirations are going down so people in a sense are learning about themselves they get closer to to reality our second hypothesis is that the effect is stronger among the younger cohort and this is because they experience reunification at this time when there are a point in which they can make some changes for at this point when when you know at the age of 18 it's it's a post reunification period for even the older cohort but we expect that these are stronger for the younger because they are able to make they have more time to react to this and then finally the change that we see aspirations by the age of by-the-by grade 8 among the younger cohorts is fully explaining any change in attainment that we see in terms of the difference between the two groups and this is what we find so we find that it's true there is a very strong link so if you have high aspirations using your grade seven aspirations this has an impact it has a 46% search point you have a higher chance of achieving it it's even stronger in using your grade eight aspirations on the second hypothesis it also seems to be the case that most students in the younger cohort aspire and more of them are obtaining the arbitral but it's relevant for both groups so it's not just something that we're seeing among the younger cohort and finally this change in aspiration in aerates is fully explaining this change in attainment that we wear that we see so it's explaining all of the differences across the two groups of students so that takes me then to this sort of final part and here one showing you so far is that it's very soon after reunification educational aspirations increased and they translated into higher educational attainment several years later but then the question is and why are these educational investments changing and here as I said at the start we can think in a sense about what a standard education model would tell us and it would tell us that there are three important driving forces what we expect to actually and once we add once we once we complete our degree so the expected returns to education how much we expect again for our studies the second is the uncertainty around this decision this educational decision and also the economic or the consumption preferences that we have and all three of these are going to drive our decision to to enter into education and to continue into education but this is often very challenging because it's very difficult to actually not only to measure each of these components but to separately measure these components and to try and understand why it might be that's driving these these educational attainment but also these changes in response to changes in aspirations so in order to shed light on the mechanism what we are able to do is we are able to measure actually the youths expected returns to education and we also use the socio and economic preferences to give us a sense of what their consumption preferences may be and also the the psychological measures which can act as a proxy okay they act as a way for us to measure how how students feel with respect to things like concerts and see around potentially their decision and then we link these two aspirational changes as well so going on to the first point we asked two questions firstly do these adolescents respond to implied increases in your returns to an aversive as I mentioned before there were very big differences between the East and the West so while the returns to education was only 15% in the East it was 70% in the West so a convergence in a sense implied that there would be these increases these changes in your returns to education and also then does this explain why an individual might change their aspiration is it is it responsible for check if you have these implied increases is it responsible for increasing your aspirations so we do this by looking at the response of students to a question again that they are asked before and after reunification both cohorts again in which they're asked what is the importance to study in school in order to and more later and they're asked this on a scale from one to four and what we find is that this following reunification goes up quite significant so it goes up by no point five standard deviations from the mean from the second part and I think this is interesting in itself because the second part we're trying to understand how and whether your economic and your social preferences are changing following this big political regime change that we see in in Germany and this is important because there's been a lot of work which has looked at the the persistence of culture in in our decisions so here we want to understand if there is this cultural persistence and also is the do do people actually adapt to the new regime in terms of their preferences so to look at the economic preferences we have again similarly the students are asked about how important it is for them as a goal to consume luxury goods to enjoy life they are also asked how important it is this is again is before and after so we can understand that there may be some changes for supporting socialism of the GDR but also other things like which are more related to this this feeling of being part of a collective or a society and also the importance of doing good deeds so and these in a sense you can you can think that both with respect to the economic and the social preferences the the responses if they're changing it it would be interesting to see if they're going in the direction where they're the following war the new regime so if they look a little bit more like the preferences that you see in the West and this is something that we see so both economic preferences following unification again very soon after reunification increase so consuming luxury goods does become much more important than it was before so those enjoying life political preferences here too we see that the importance of supporting socialism goes down and this may you may imagine but also other sorts of social preferences such as being part of a collective or helping others more both of these are also going down to in terms of linking them with changes in aspiration well it does seem to be the case that when all of these are relevant for changes in aspiration it does seem that those who changed more the economic preferences sorry they're expected return the importance that they put on the the the importance that they put on school for their expected return are also those who increase their aspirations much more similarly those who were more inclined to reduce their support for socialism are also those who are more inclined to have a change in their aspiration so you do see that there is this link between these changes and preferences these change in inspirations which then eventually lead to changes in outcomes and then for the final part again in itself is relatively interesting because here this is asking about sort of the uncertainty and here we're looking at this via these psychological measures and it's it's been shown in other sorts of in other settings and in particular in developing countries where it's shown that one's internal constraints so one psychological constraints can actually be an importance of explanation for why we may see lower aspirations so here we're asking the question whether it's the case that any change in the external environment can actually impact one's internal constraints as well and again whether these internal constraints are relevant or have an impact on educational aspirations as well so without going into too many details we do find that there is this difference so we do see that changes in your external environment are relevant so we have three distinct measures so we have measures of the self-confidence of their anger and of their anxiety and well before we unification across the two different cohorts you don't see any differences in these in these psychological measures and well-being measures following reunification you do find that the level of anger goes up the level of anxiety goes up which is not surprising given that this is a momentous change and the amount of self-confidence goes down but linking this to aspirational changes what we what we find is that those who became more angry are those who actually were the ones who increase their aspirations more and similarly those who became more self-confident or at least where we're less inclined to reduce their self-confidence are also the ones for who aspirations are increasing so here just summing up some of the lessons from from this study firstly that the aspirations among school-aged children adolescents adapt relatively quickly to this societal change it translates into a actual change in college attendance or participation and tree' later on and it highlights this link between goal-setting and the links that you make with your investment the decisions that you're making and I think here we're also shedding some light into the mechanism behind so why is it that these these changes are happening so let me wrap up and I think I want to sort of have the two sort of main messages to take away from from these various studies and the first is that I think it's important to pay attention to the aspirations of the young I think that the evidence that we're seeing is aspirations are an important predictor of our future outcomes so young girls and even young professionals we see that your early career aspirations have impacts for your promotion later but among school children as well you're seeing that their aspirations are a good predictor for what they will do several years down the line and so it suggests that the the sort of motivation the the aspirations that you have they drive the decisions that we we take and it's also driving in a sense the efforts that you will make to you to try to achieve these these goals and the other is that aspirations they Polly are reflecting your preference and they're probably reflecting your your expectation of what you can and can't achieve but they were also something which can be shaped so with the example of the lawyers we can see that early work experiences are sort of explaining differences in aspirations even among just just women when you look at education you can also imagine that having interventions at an early stage can potentially help the aspirate or change shape the aspirations of young children and also then the political and social environment seems to be also reflecting one of the aspirations and we're seeing these sorts of longer-run consequences as well so then this in a sense this takes me to there my final words which is that I think often when we look at the political landscape and the influences of educational and professional decisions we we they seem to be relevant especially for the young they seem to have long-standing implications with with important consequences but it's often not something that politics takes into account or policies take into account that when we see for instance these changes in political regime across countries often the focus is what's going on today how does it affect workers today how does it affect immigration policy how does they affect firms but a lot less attention is paid on how does this affect the younger individuals who are also experiencing these changes and the issue is is that it not only is it not considered it's also not incorporated because we won't see the consequences of this for another 10-15 years once these these students are in the labor market so this in a sense is something I think also then deserves a lot more attention thank you grazie tante is amigas Allah purchased LeZion in pessoa paraíba Nissim okay ka-tow questo periodo veramente particular analyst or arrow pea monkey la prima party may pursue tomahto sua student ideology Nellist at him it over a certain to add ginger came person non abbiamo butyl mented presented prima della della Kakuta del Moro Nell Nell Republic del s del Aditya no no leaky supportive initially stood in on non era possibly Arab Estanza canal is a to macaron le Cheyne Saville : ostracon chilly air America que viene de dullest layers today to physically photometry timid Nanak you know pot even chillier libel mental Allah tabs on anchor tener canto de cristo khandoba Dom oh well ok we know - for a Turkish tea the Christie's 2d y desarrollo de república la posibilidad de ferran daily demand a echo a burma microphone Oh prego well first of all thank you for your presentation my question is related to one of the last slides we saw and it's about the policy implication of of these studies what can be the policies that we can implement to create an environment in which the aspirations of young people can can develop and can can grow what policies can change and shape maybe shape is a very strong word when when we talk about aspirations of course I guess that the unification or Germany was a very effective policies but it's not a policy we're at our hand right now so that's my question thank you okay actually I mean I think there's a number of ways in which this can be done and there is some recent interesting work by Professor Liana la Farah in from Bocconi and a group of researchers in which they are doing some interventions especially among immigrant students in Italy in which they are providing zuv motivational classes giving them information about what they can do what they can achieve and and here this is one way in which or essentially you're intervening on aspiration so this is just one example and they're looking specifically at immigrant students but we could imagine that you could do this for different groups but this is one way in which you can intervene and they are finding actually positive results in terms of educational attainment and also staying in education for longer I three demanded three go thank you many times when we look at our miserable political situation here we think that we should invest more in into education and but your son is seems to contradict this this thing because but basically what you're saying is that politics has a short-term effect on the aspirations of young people while education may be may have a longer so an effect that is lasting longer in time can you comment on that is that correct I mean why would say is that the there are externalities of the political regime that I think we're not taking into account so I think I mean we we don't tend to incorporate the fact that these sorts of the rise in population changes in the way politics is done is having an impact to a greater extent than we potentially would be would have in mind so these effects are I think are not short-term at all I think actually there are these longer run implications because the politics of today are not only affecting individuals who are within the labor market today they're affecting people who are to come into the labor market eventually as well now with respect to sort of spending in schools again I mean this is a important and big area in those ways in which we could focus more specifically on things like aspirations or or even sort of social behavioral attitudes which are also then feeding into our our aspirations and I think in a sense if anything is the research is highlighting that that there were more aspects in which you can intervene rather than work rather than some traditional ways in which we have been intervening not demanded prego Thank You professor it's really nice that to meet you here because I've been reading your papers so basically recently I've read this these set of papers which are saying that in academia even if you have a woman in the hiring committees still you don't have there's no improvement which makes my aspiration level quite low because I'm studying economics and we see all these problems in women in economics so what do you have to say like I want to know your comment on that or how do you think that reforms could be brought about in academia thank you yeah this touches on a really important topic a superb topic which I'm interested in myself as well in terms of research and you're right that the evidence in terms of these recent reforms that we've seen in terms of gender quotas on committees or boards the results have been quite mixed and in some cases actually be negative in terms of performance of firms but I'm still hopeful actually I think that because I gained anything here there's there's a number of different angles that we can look at so first of all performance may not be the only measure of interest there are other aspects in terms of for example how things are run how things are done and the other and I think more important is the longer run implications that these policies can have so even if it's through something like a role-model effect well today we may not see the the sort of the big games in terms of productivity your performance perhaps 15 20 years down the line we're going to see naturally gender parity so we wouldn't need these types of policies and and that's the achievement and it's again it's this idea that we're not internalizing some of these are the types of potential effects and then I think it also it could point to that there are other ways in which we can try to work on gender equality in the labour market so there we may need to find other routes to get to it and I think some of the work that I presented today also kind of suggests that while you see that these aspiration gaps appear even among professional women in the legal sector that these differences are Polly explained by your your environment and actually interestingly even there I mean women who have the same levels of aspiration so if they have high aspirations their outcomes are very similar to men who have high aspirations so they're as likely to make partner ism as a male lawyer who has high aspirations the differences are there on average and also there doesn't seem to be in the workplaces of explicit discrimination of how you're rewarding performance again for the same levels of performance men and women are rewarded similarly but where these gaps are coming from are potentially these experiences that you may have and then your desire to want to stay within the profession or to progress in the profession as well you know mattre demand a quick TCC quick a dope or dope yeah let wanted to tap in into your last comment so going back to the study on lawyers it seems as you've said that from an educational standpoint the gap is very closer although there is a lot of ground to cover there but so my question is should we maybe also tap into the aspiration of the more advantaged groups so should we maybe I think here for example about male other confidence teach males to be less overconfident that's it's an interesting that you raise that actually because one I have didn't talk about it here over one of the aspects that we're looking at is the you we can look at the levels of satisfaction and regret among these lawyers of time and actually what you find is that it's its main lawyers who have higher levels of regrets especially if they don't make it as partner which may suggest I mean I was talking about this idea of goals that saying I'm making a bet against yourself and it may be that I mean the men have a too high goal and then I mean it becomes more difficult to actually maintain and to reach and win this bet against yourself so it could be true and I think this comes through in the levels of satisfaction your happiness your feelings of regret so it this is very interesting yeah one of the one of the things that often comes out in gender pay studies is that the gap really widens when particularly when women have their first child and do you see this in also in the aspiration particularly in your lawyers study so well the aspiration to have a family or not is that important in whether people make partner and whether they want to make partner in the longer term yeah no this is this is very important so we do find actually with women in our sample that irrespective of whether they have kids or not there are there are aspiration differences compared with men but you're absolutely right I mean it does seem to be this is also another decision you're making and there you can imagine that it's you you're probably taking this into account with respect to how the organization is structured so even though we're not seeing evidence of some explicit discrimination within the within the within the family what you may see actually is that there will implicit institutional discrimination that comes about because this organization is not designed to accommodate for for for women who are heavier with young children and this is something that we see especially in terms of things like performance so one of the differences that we find which is responsible for promotion differences later is the number of hours that you built a client so this is one of the performance measures and there what you find is that there is a distinct difference between not just men and women but women with young children compared with men with young children so there you find that they're much less likely to have higher so I was built so it does seem to be something that's constraining within in terms of their performance which then does have important implications later for promotion hi here so thanks for the presentation it was very interesting and it's also interesting thinking about the literature and how expectations are formed usually it's often it's related to how the individuals form their expectations but it's interested to incorporate also how the environment shapes them so this is very interesting and my questions with respect to the paper on the Berlin Wall is whether there were also changes in the educational system and institutional changes with which drive your results because it's a quite big effect and with respect to the big big effect I would like us to know maybe if there are some it originated is in who are these people who actually changed their expectations in response to the institution that involve these things are important so one of the reasons oh you're right some things changed in terms of the school structure in the very short run very little change small differences like for example they would have two hours of socialist teaching per week and this then disappeared but this is partly the reason why we're looking so narrowly around reunification because in the short run very little was changing within the schools the same teachers mostly the same subject but and and that's what it kind of made it quite interesting that very shortly after reunification and knowing that there was going to be this convergence to the west you see this of adaptation happening among the students in the in the east for your second point I mean this this is something I was kind of trying to get into with the mechanism about who is it that's changing and this is what we were finding that it's those who were updating the most in terms of the the weight that they put on the importance of the School of Education for then later earning more in life so those who updated the most were those who then increase their aspirations the most as well and similarly those who had stronger economic preferences like for consumption were also the ones who are updating and social preferences as well so those who were more inclined to to sort of converge with this individualistic idea that is more represented in in Western societies were also those who increase the respiration so it's basically showing that those who are converging the most in terms of their preferences were also the ones who change the respirations and then went into university more as well putting a question putting a question myself I was very struck by the first part of your lecture from these lawyers and can do you have do you know anything about similar studies in Europe are the differences between countries so I haven't seen studies which have looked at other countries and I think part of main reason we're focusing on the u.s. is because the data that we have is coming from the American Bar Association in which they're asked about all of these difference or preferences and tracking them later on in life in terms of how the systems work I mean I'm more familiar with the the UK and I imagine that it's not very different there may be some differences I think pay is probably not as high as it is in the in the US but I think the way in which the system works as in the track that you're on in terms of going to law school joining a private law firm and then being on this track to make partner this is something that you see in other countries as well and I and I think this is the case in other European countries too Tresa Ozma people st dot e le le conclusioun acadia dottore a generic second Amitabha Sutra meant a continual some Christakis to tipo di studi non solo nella German ideology purchase a condo Mariota terrible completamente Diversey monkey bear totally altri pricey in a Naropa Yankee Natalia Queenie un grande grad missile Neumann Takata di da la profesora same English a viene de Liverpool equidad Damona cosas como una questa Sara tell a final finalist Amidala Champions League Thiago Yamaha lavatory the Liverpool Kenichi D telescope within gracias okay
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