I just finished a panel on gender and bargaining. At one point, I was asked how my own field experiments have lent insights into the area. My argument centered on what is believed to be a key stylized fact: women shy away from bargaining compared to their male counterparts. I wanted to not get into a debate about the premise, but ask why. In the end, I think that will be the deepest contribution of field experiments anyway. I started with my older @QJEHarvard paper on discrimination. In that product market, I found sellers targeted women with worse initial offers, anticipating little push back. But, I also found something interesting about the returns to bargaining: even if a woman gets a good deal, she must bargain three times longer than a man to get it. So, that paper ends with insights on the opportunity cost of time and returns to bargaining (see here: ideas.repec.org/p/feb/natura…). My response on the panel then turned to the rules of the game in an exploration of wage negotiations. Some years ago, Andreas Leibbrandt and I found that when bargaining rules are ambiguous, men negotiated more than women. But, when we added the simple line, "Wages are negotiable," guess what happened? The gender negotiation gap completely vanished, and indeed women were slightly more likely to negotiate (see here: ideas.repec.org/p/feb/natura…). My takeaway: women are not necessarily averse to bargaining compared to men in general. The “why” behind the key stylized fact is that women shy away from unwritten, ambiguous rules. I suspect that arises in this setting because such rules often penalize them socially. The ambiguity is then leveraged by others in the marketplace to take advantage. An implication is that if you want equity in your particular setting, be it in the workplace or marketplace, the cheapest and most scalable fix is not asking women or men to change their behaviors. We should add clarity to the system.

PISA just dropped new test results. The headlines are unequivocal: "lowest OECD scores ever recorded"; "US at its worst mark in history." A year-plus of learning "lost." Then comes the usual hand-wringing about American kids falling behind other countries we presume we should beat. I want to call a pause to this for just one moment and ask: what exactly does PISA measure? A few years back we published a paper that puts things into perspective: ideas.repec.org/p/feb/framed… Surprise students with cash for right answers just before a PISA-style test begins and US scores jump substantially; Shanghai scores don't move. Same kids, same knowledge, different effort, different PISA percentile. In this way, the paper shows that PISA scores bundle two things: what kids know and whether they feel like showing it on a test that counts for nothing in their lives. I suspect the same happened this year, and the fact that over 40% of US test-takers didn't even bother finishing the accompanying questionnaire is consistent with that hypothesis. That number was so high that the OECD flagged the US results for potential bias. I am not saying that US education is fine. Indeed, quite the opposite, as we should be doing much, much more, beginning prenatally. I am just calling into question the received wisdom: "American kids know a year less than they did" and "American kids try less on tests that don't matter" are different diagnoses with very different treatments.