Marianne Bertrand

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Marianne Bertrand (born c. 1970) is a

One key area of Bertrand's research is labour economics, in particular racial and gender discrimination. Together with Sendhil Mullainathan, she finds that the introduction of antitakeover legislation, which shield companies somewhat from competition, in the 1980s raised wages by 1–2%, thus suggesting that managers have some discretion in wage setting.^[10] 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.^[11] Relatedly, Bertrand, Mullainathan and Dolly Chugh have argued for the existence of implicit discrimination, which – unlike taste-based or statistical discrimination – is unintentional and of which the discriminator is unaware.^[12] In another exploration of racial discrimination, Bertrand, Mullainathan and David Abrams find that judges in Illinois vary in the degree to which race influences their sentencing, with smaller gaps between white and Afro-American incarceration rates for Afro-American judges and judges passing comparatively many incarceration sentences also being disproportionately likely to sentence Afro-Americans to jail.^[13]

Studying the impact of entry regulation on job creation in France with Francis Kramarz, Bertrand finds that regional zoning boards' tendency to deter the creation or extension of retail stores increased retailer concentration and slowed down employment growth.^[14] In another study of the impact of infra-industry competition on wages, Bertrand finds that growth in import competition makes workers' wages more sensitive to the current unemployment rate and less sensitive to the unemployment rate that prevailed at the time they were hired, thus suggesting that import competition may erode the implicit contracts between employers and their employees.^[15]

Analysing the gender gap with

Another interesting research pertaining to gender gap is about effect of board quotas on female labor force in Norway. 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. They found that this bill benefited young female business graduates the most. The overall conclusion after seven years was that this law had minimum impact on the larger society of women, expect for those who were actually on the board.[21]

Research on corporate governance, family firms and finance

Another major area of Bertrand's research is corporate governance. Together with Mullainathan, Bertrand has researched the determinants of CEO pay, contrasting the contracting view – shareholders set CEO contracts in such a way as to limit moral hazard – with the skimming view – CEOs set their own pay by manipulation the compensation committee to skim as much as possible.^[22] In line with the skimming view, they find that CEO pay responds just as much to luck – shocks to the firm performance that are objectively beyond their control – as to developments over which they have control, with the sensitivity to luck being generally higher in firms with poor corporate governance.^[23] Moreover, Bertrand and Mullainathan find that the more managers' firms are sheltered from competition, e.g. antitakeover laws, the more wages rise and productivity and profitability fall, possibly due to decreases in the destruction of old and the creation of new plants, suggesting that managers may prefer stability to empire building.^[24] Together with Antoinette Schoar, Bertrand has investigated the effect of managers on firm policies in the U.S., finding that a large share of differences between firms' investment, financial, and organizational practices are due to differences in their managers and, more importantly, their management style, with older managers generally being more conservative and managers with MBA degrees being generally more aggressive in terms of corporate decisions.^[25] In work with Schoar and David Thesmar, Bertrand observes that after the deregulation of banking in France in 1985, banks became less willing to bail out firms with poor performance and firms being more dependent on banks became more likely to restructure, with rising rates of job and asset reallocation, higher allocative efficiency, and a less concentrated banking sector, an observation in line with Schumpeterian processes of creative destruction.^[26] 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.^[27]

Bertrand and Schoar have also conducted research on the role of family for

Other topics of Bertrand's research include econometric methodology, welfare cultures, advertising, lobbyism, and trickle-down consumption:

• Because of the correlation between measurement errors of subjective data and many personal characteristics and behaviours, subjective data do not make good
  dependent variables, though they can be useful as explanatory variables (with Mullainathan).^[36]
• The standard errors of research applying difference in differences estimation to time-series or panel data with serially correlated outcomes are likely to understate the real standard errors if such autocorrelation is not accounted for (with Mullainathan and Esther Duflo).^[37]
• Being surrounded by others who speak the same language increases welfare participation more for those from high welfare-using language groups (with Erzo Luttmer and Mullainathan).^[38]
• Advertising through the inclusion of a photo of an attractive woman increases demand for consumer loans, decreasing the number of example loans, or not suggesting particular uses for a loan increases loan demand by as much as a 25% reduction in the credit rate, as do longer deadlines for loan applications (with Mullainathan, Shafir, Dean Karlan and Jonathan Zinman).^[39]
• Evidence on lobbyism in the US does not support the expertise view, wherein lobbyism provides issue-specific expertise to politicians, as the sole explanation for lobbyism and instead suggests that lobbyists focus on developing a "circle of influence" within which they represent the special interests of their clients (with Matilde Bombardini and Francesco Trebbi).^[40]
• Especially for visible goods and services, the share of non-rich households' incomes spent on consumption increases in their exposure to higher top income and consumption, suggesting a role for conspicuous consumption with regard to inequality (with Adair Morse).^[41]
• The cost of political connections (joint with Francis Kramarz and David Thesmar)^[42]
• What do high interest borrowers do with their tax rebates?

Other activities

• Barcelona School of Economics, Member of the Scientific Council (since 2022)^[43]

Awards, honors and grants

• Jan Söderberg Family Prize in Economics and Management^[44]
• Elaine Bennett Research Prize
• Brattle Group Prize
• Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Fellowship of the Econometric Society
• John T. Dunlop Outstanding Scholar Award
• Doctor Honoris Cause, University of Geneva, 2016.
• Doctor Honoris Causa, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 2016.
• National Bureau of Economic Research Grant for Research on non-Profit Institutions, 1999.
• Citigroup Behavioral Sciences Research Grant, 1997–1998
• American Compensation Association (A.C.A) Research Grant, 1996.^[45]

Selected bibliography

• Bertrand, Marianne;
  doi:10.1257/aer.90.2.203
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• Bertrand, Marianne;
  doi:10.1162/00335530152466269
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• Bertrand, Marianne; Duflo, Esther; Mullainathan, Sendhil (2004). "How Much Should We Trust Differences-In-Differences Estimates?" (PDF).
  S2CID 470667
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• Bertrand, Marianne;
  doi:10.1257/0002828042002561
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• Bertrand, Marianne;
  S2CID 14064167
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• Bertrand, Marianne;
  doi:10.1162/qjec.2007.122.4.1639
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• Bertrand, Marianne;
  S2CID 3231264
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• Bertrand, Marianne; Morse, Adair (December 2011). "Information disclosure, cognitive biases, and payday borrowing". The Journal of Finance. 66 (6): 1865–1893.
  doi:10.1111/j.1540-6261.2011.01698.x
  .