Understanding the Drivers of the Gender Productivity Gap in the Economics Profession

In this paper, I construct a novel data set from individual curriculum vitae of economists at the top 100 US departments to study gender differences in the drivers of scholarly performance. Using a Shapley decomposition procedure to estimate the contribution of each driver in explaining the variation in mean and inequality of research performance, I find that for women, current placement is a more important driver of performance and inequality in performance compared to men. For men, co-authorship is the most important driver. Overall, my results suggest that networks are the key driver of performance and of inequality in performance. JEL codes: A14, J16, J24