Reference no: EM133636838

The CEO of your company has recently announced one of his primary objectives is to increase the number of women in managerial positions. While nearly 50% of entry-level jobs for college- educated workers at your firm are filled by women, only 25% of mid-level managerial roles are filled by women. This has been true for the past 15 years. The human resources department is responsible for designing a firm-level policy to accomplish this objective, and must deliver a report to the CEO and board of directors discussing the policy.

Section 1: Detail the policy: Encourage senior managers to be supportive of 3 months of paid parental leave for fathers, and circulate to all employees the fraction of senior managers that support 3 months of paternity leave

Section 2: Discuss economic intuition for why it may increase the number of women managers. Provide two reasons. This section should incorporate class material, for example discussing the effect on the value of market time vs. nonmarket time, investments in general or firm-specific human capital, discrimination, and other supply- or demand- side topics we have discussed.

Section 3: Discuss economic intuition for why it may not increase the number of women managers. Provide two reasons. See above about referencing class material.

Section 4: Discuss possible unintended consequences of the policy (quality of hires, effects on men, effects on worker productivity, costs to firm).

Section 5: Discuss two relevant research papers, and evaluate whether you think the findings are relevant to your firm. You might discuss whether the findings are based on a study from another country, or in another industry, from an earlier time period, or from an experiment, or a government policy rather than a firm policy.

Section 6: Discuss how you will evaluate whether the policy is effective. In particular, consider comparing an outcome before and after you implement the policy. One concern is that something else may have changed during the time you implemented the policy, for example a competitor also introduces the same policy or the country enters a recession. Using one of the strategies we have discussed in class, for example randomization, describe how you could separate the effect of the policy from the effect of these other changes. The best responses in this section will use a strategy other than "controlling for other variables". If you are using randomization, be sure to explain what the treatment and control groups are, how they are determined, and why this helps you to identify the effect of the policy from other factors.

Section 7: Final conclusions on whether to implement the policy.