Anna Sanz de Galdeano (University of Alicante)

joint with Julián Messina and Anastasia Terskaya

We use matched employer-employee data for Brazil (RAIS) to study gender asymmetries in peer effects in the workplace. We analyse how peers’ average ability influences wages and, in particualr, whether peers' influence differs for men and women, and whether the influcence of peers of the same sex peers and of the opposite differs, which would be consistent with the predictions of economic models of behaviour and interactions that incorporate the psychology and sociology of identity. Given that both individuals’ and average peers’ ability are unobserved we need to estimate them, and we do so by taking advantage of the panel structure of the data (Arcidiacono et al., 2012). We control for workers’ selection by including occupation-firm fixed effects as well as time-specific firm and occupation fixed effects. We find that peer effects in the workplace are sizeable in Brazil and we uncover significant gender asymmetries in peer effects in the workplace.