• AEA in the news
  • November 30, 2017

Vox cites AER paper on sexual harassment

TV personality Matt Lauer, left, was recently fired by NBC amid allegations that he sexually harassed women at the network.

Debby Wong

Vox featured a paper that appeared in the May 2011 issue of The American Economic Review in an article about how sexual harassment in the workplace affects women’s earnings. In the paper “Compensating Differentials for Sexual Harassment,” Vanderbilt professor Joni Hersch used harassment claims data from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to calculate the risks of sexual harassment for different industries. She found that people in jobs with a higher risk of harassment earned slightly higher wages than women in jobs with a lower risk.