Jenny Säve-Söderbergh Assistant professor

Gender Differences: Origins and Consequences 

PhD course , 2018, 2020

Below is an overview of my research:

1. Gender and negotiation behavior

• “Do Women Ask for Less and Give-in More than Men do in a Negotiation? A Lab-based Study of Gender Gaps in Asking and Accommodating Behavior“: this is an on-going project aimed at testing gender gaps in accepting and accommodating behavior in a salary negotiation in the lab. Within this project we also test using a different design how beliefs about how others negotiate can affect gender gaps in bidding behavior. This is joint work with Christine Alamaa, SOFI.

• In an on-going broad research project on gender gaps in expected pay we study (i) how a simle information intervention can change the gender gap in expected pay, see“The Promise (and Peril) in Approaching Gender Parity: Preregistered Status Experiments that Impact Gender Inequality in Negotiation”, in Labour Economics August 2023, (ii) if and how changes in the gender pay gap of recent alumni leads to updated expected pay, and subsequently to changes in the actual pay using a rich combination of Swedish survey and tax-register data, see working paper “Changes in Gender Equality on the Labor Market: How Do Students Update Their Beliefs of Future
  Earnings in Response?”, http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4458264). Both projects are joint work with Emelie Fröberg, Richard Wahlund and Wiley Wakeman at Stockholm School of Economics. Moreover, (iii) in joint work with Francesca Manzi (London School of Economics), Leib Litman (Touro University), and Zohn Rosen (Colombia University), we do research targeting finding the most effective information intervention that can reduce gender inequality in accepted pay among online gig-workers.
• In recent work we study why women ask for less in negotiations using a pre-registered analysis of survey data, in Labour Economics, 2022. This is joint work with Anna Dreber Almenberg, SSE, and Emma Heikensten, SEB.   

2. Pensions and gender  

• “To Transfer Or Not To Transfer: An Investigation of the Swedish Pension Transfer Program” is an on-going project in which we investigate how a Swedish reform on pensions transfers affected take up and later reduction of poverty using Swedish pension data.  This is joint work with Yevhenia Hrabovska, Stockholm School of Economics, Marieke Bos, Stockholm School of Economics, and Wenli Li, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
• “Kvinnors och mäns kunskap om pensioner och pensionssystemet - en redovisning av en enkätundersökning kombinerad med registerdata” is a project using new survey data investigating gender gaps in the knowledge about those parts of the pension system that specifically are aimed at ameliorating gender inequality, see ISF RAPPORT 2022:1. This is joint work with Stefanie König at ISF.
• “Who lacks pension knowledge, why and does it matter? Evidence from Swedish retirement savers” in Public Finance Review 2022 and IFAU Report 2020:23, use Swedish register data combined with a survey. This is joint work with Mikael Elinder, Uppsala university, Johannes Hagen, Jönköping University and Mattias Nordin, Uppsala university.

3. Labor market policy evaluation

• In two recent ISF reports we present causal evidence of how coordinated (from four collaborators – regionen, kommunen, Arbetsförmedlingen och Försäkringskassan), as opposed to single-sided support from each collaborator, has a significant positive effect on future earnings and income using (i) a policy evaluation of effects from attaining coordinated support in Malmökraften using a randomized selection of participant into the program and (ii) a randomized controlled trial executed within different “Samordningsförbund” in Göteborg and Stockholm, see ISF RAPPORT 2023:2 and ISF RAPPORT 2024:12.

4. Financial Literacy and debt attitudes

This field of research covers work on the level of financial literacy in Sweden following up on “Financial Literacy and Retirement Planning in Sweden” (joint with Johan Almenberg) in Journal of Pension Economics and Finance (2011). Two more follow ups have been done on financial litercay in Sweden, see “Attitudes Toward Debt and Debt Behavior” (joint with Johan Almenberg, Annamaria Lusardi and Roine Vestman) in Scandinavian Journal of Economics (2022), from 2017, and “Who lacks pension knowledge, why and does it matter? Evidence from Swedish retirement savers” in Public Finance Review (2022) from 2019 (joint with Mikael Elinder, Johannes Hagen and Mattias Nordin).

5. Gender and risk-taking

This field covers previous work on gender gaps in risk-taking first exploiting risk-taking across generations and gender compositions in the game-show Jeopardy, see “Children do not behave like adults: Gender gaps in performance and risk taking within a random social context in the high-stakes game shows Jeopardy and Junior Jeopardy”, Economic Journal (2017). Secondly, I have explored risk taking in the Swedish pension reform for the premium pension, see “Self-directed Pensions: Gender, Risk and Portfolio Choices” in Scandinavian Journal of Economics (2012).

6. Policy-reports

This covers previous work on evaluating the causal effect of introducing simplified sick leave certificates, see ISF Report “Förenklade Läkarintyg och inflödet till sjukförsäkringen: En analys av effekterna på vårdenhetsnivå och regionnivå”. Moreover in "Makar som delar på kakan- En ESO rapport om jämställda pensioner" (2017), I present results on the level of partners’ choices of pension transfers aimed at equalizing gender gaps in pensions.

7. Other fields on decision-making and investments

This field covers research on e.g., investment behaviour in ethical funds, bounded rationality, taxation and risk-taking.