Upcoming Session
Monday, March 16, 2026
17:30h
Presented by
Sonia Bhalotra (University of Warwick)
https://sites.google.com/site/srbhalotra/home?authuser=0

Firm responses to legislation on workplace sexual harassment (with Medha Chatterjee, Kanika Mahajan, Daksh Walia, Fan Wang)

Abstract

As many as half of all women the world over report having experienced workplace sexual harassment at some stage in their careers. In contrast to existing work focused upon the impact that this has on women, we investigate the impact on firms. First, we model the sexual harassment process at the firm level, showing that the incidence of sexual harassment is jointly determined with female share and firm size. Second, we introduce sexual harassment into the firm’s production function as a drag on female labour productivity, showing that it incentivizes firms to segregate the workforce by gender. Third, we show that impacts of a policy designed to encourage reporting and redressal of sexual harassment will depend upon the elasticity of substitution between male and female labour and TFP and, as a result, policy impacts will tend to vary with baseline female share and firm size. India implemented such a policy in 2013. Using firm-level panel data supplemented with survey data, we estimate reduced form impacts of the policy on firm size and female share. We then calibrate the model, allowing firm-specific production function parameters. We produce estimates of the productivity effects of sexual harassment, and of changes in sexual harassment after the policy as a function of policy parameters.

About this workshop

The Public Governance workshop is an online seminar series focused on state of art research in political economy that uses non-traditional data and data-intensive methods.

The workshop gives a platform for the research on the role of governance in designing and developing better policies. Key features are the political environment, the role of the media, the engagement of stakeholders such as civil society and firms, the market structure and level of competition, and the independence of public regulators, among others. Particular emphasis is placed on research with NLP methods due to the proven usefulness of transforming text into data for further econometric analysis.

Periodicity: Mondays from 17h30 to 19h.

If you would like to present, attend, or have any question about seminar, please contact Vladimir Avetian (vladimir.avetian@dauphine.psl.eu) or Edgar Jimenez Bedolla (edgar.jimenez-bedolla@dauphine.psl.eu)

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