Dr Noriko Amano-Patiño

Dr Noriko Amano-Patiño is a University Assistant Professor at the University of Cambridge. Her research primarily focuses on understanding the sources and implications of different dimensions of inequality across genders and racial groups. Prior to joining the faculty of Economics at Cambridge, she obtained her PhD at Yale University in 2018, where she specialised in the fields of Labour Economics and Applied Econometrics.

Human Capital Accumulation, Equilibrium Wage-Setting, and the Life-Cycle Gender Pay Gap

Cambridge Working Papers in Economics No. 2010

with Tatiana Baron, and Pengpeng Xiao , (Feb 2021)

We study how turnover and human capital dynamics shape the life-cycle gender pay gap when employers are forward-looking and able to set gender-specific wage rates. In our equilibrium wage-posting model with learning-by-doing and fertility events, the life-cycle gap can be attributed to worker productivity, job search, employers’ endogenous wage-setting, and job productivity. Estimating the model on NLSY79 data, we find that the high school and college gaps are driven by different forces, but employers' wage-setting accounts for one-third of the gap in both groups. Neglecting interactions between turnover and human capital dynamics biases down the estimated role of turnover substantially.

Non-technical summary: Cambridge Economics alumni webinar series

The Unequal Effects of COVID-19 on Economists’ Research Productivity

Cambridge Working Papers in Economics No. 2038

with Elisa Faraglia, Chryssi Giannitsarou, and Zeina Hasna

The current lockdown measures are expected to disproportionately reduce women’s labour productivity in the short run. This paper analyses the effects of these measures on the research productivity among economists. We analyse the patterns of working papers publications using data from the NBER Working Papers Series, the CEPR Discussion Paper Series, the newly established preprint of Covid Economics: Vetted and Real Time Papers, kindly provided by CEPR, and VoxEU columns. Our preliminary analysis suggests that although the relative number of female authors in non-pandemic related research has remained stable with respect to recent years (at around 20%), women constitute only 12% of the total number of authors working on COVID-19. Moreover, we see that it is primarily senior economists who are contributing to this new area. Mid-career and junior economists record the biggest gap between non-COVID and COVID research, and the gender differences are particularly stark at the mid-career level. Mid-career female economists have not yet started working on this new research area: only 12 mid-career female authors have contributed to COVID-19 related. research so far, out of a total of 647 distinct authors in our dataset of papers (NBER, CEPR, and CEPR Covid Economics).

Website: CAPER Project

Media Coverage: VoxEU, Nature, El Mundo, Cambridge Centre for International Research podcast, Society Byte, Le Monde, Times Higher Education

Nutritional Inequality: The Role of Prices, Income, and Preferences

(January 2019)

In the USA, lower income households have a less healthy consumption basket than higher income ones. This paper studies the drivers of such nutrition inequality. I use longitudinal home-scanner data to estimate a demand system on food products, and measure the contribution of disposable income for food, prices and preferences to nutrition inequality. Disposable income and preferences have a predominant and quantitatively similar role in explaining consumption basket differences across income groups. Instead, prices have a limited effect. Further, I merge nutritional label information to assess, through a series of counterfactual exercises, the effect of income subsidies on nutrition quality. For example, I show that increasing the budget of a low-income household to the average level of the higher income households (a 45% increase) leads to an increase in protein consumption of approximately 5% and a decrease in sugar consumption of approximately 10%.

The Effect of Affirmative Action on Workers' Outcomes

with Julián Arámburu and Zara Contractor

Fifty-five years after the introduction of affirmative action in employment in the USA, there is a lack of consensus regarding the effect of this policy on workers’ careers (Holzer and Neumark, 2000). This paper contributes to fill this gap by constructing the first administrative database containing worker-level information (from the Longitudinal Employment Household Dynamics) as well as the federal contractor status of workers’ employers (from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Data and Federal Procurement Data). We estimate the causal effects of affirmative action on workers’ outcomes exploiting different features specified by the legal obligations of the regulation in a regression discontinuity setting.

Media Coverage: Yale ISPS