Marianne Bertrand (born c. 1970) is a Belgian economist who currently works as Chris P. Dialynas Distinguished Service Professor of Economics and Willard Graham Faculty Scholar at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business.
In addition to her academic position, Bertrand maintains affiliations with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, where she is a member of the Board of Directors and currently co-chairs J-PAL's Labor Markets sector,[6] the Russell Sage Foundation, IZA, NBER, and CEPR.
[12] In a seminal contribution to research on racial labour market discrimination, Bertrand and Mullainathan manipulate perceived race on fictitious resumes sent in reply to help-wanted ads by using Afro-American- or Caucasian-sounding names and observe that "white names" receive 50% more callbacks for interviews, a finding that holds robustly across occupations, industries, firm sizes and controls for social class.
[17] Analysing the gender gap with Kevin Hallock, Bertrand observes that from 1992 to 1997 only 2.5% of top executives in US firms were women and that they earned on average 45% less than men, with up to 75% of that gap being explained by differences in the size of the managed firms and women's lower likelihood to be CEO, chair or president, though she also finds that female participation in top executive positions nearly tripled during that period; nonetheless, Bertrand and Hallock stress that gender discrimination via segregation or unequal promotion cannot be ruled out.
[18] Further exploring the issue of gender pay gaps with Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, Bertrand finds that although the earnings of male and female MBAs are nearly identical at the beginning of their careers, ten years later, male earnings are almost 60 log points higher, with most of the gap being explained by differences in pre-MBA training, career interruptions and weekly hours, the latter two being mostly due to motherhood.
[20] More recently, in research with Emir Kamenica and Jessica Pan, Bertrand has found that the distribution of wives' share of household income drops sharply just after 50%, which she attributes to gender norms averse to the husband earning less than his wife, a norm that in turn affects the formation of marriages, wives' labour force participation and their income conditional on working, marriage satisfaction, divorce rates, and the division of household chores.
She found that after Norway passed the law to have at least 40% women representation in board meetings, there were no significant impacts to the broader female population in the country.
[28] Finally, together with Adair Morse, Bertrand succeeds in decreasing the take-up of highly costly payday loans by 11% over a four-month period by making borrowers think about the dollar fees accruing due to the loans' roll-over, suggesting a role for information disclosure policies to remedy payday borrowing.
[31] These results are matched by Bertrand and Mullainathan's earlier research on business groups in India, which also finds significant amounts of tunneling, especially via nonoperating components of profit.
Other topics of Bertrand's research include econometric methodology, welfare cultures, advertising, lobbyism, and trickle-down consumption: