The Role of Federal Policy in Women's Entry into Medicine
During the 1970s, women’s representation in medical schools approximately tripled, mirroring similar increases in dental, law, and business programs. Using a newly constructed dataset on medical school admissions, this paper studies the role of anti-discrimination policy in increasing women’s access to medical training. My empirical strategy leverages variation across medical schools in the potential loss of federal funding by failing to comply with the non-discrimination mandate in Executive Order 11246. I find that the threat of sanction led to a sharp increase in the percentage of women enrolled in first-year medical school classes. The effects of this policy were likely amplified by a federal effort to increase enrollment—leveraging the differential timing and size of enrollment increases across institutions in a complementary accounting exercise, I find that these expansions account for around one-third of women’s gains from 1970 to 1980.
Continuous Treatment Difference-in-Differences with Unknown Controls: A Data-Driven Approach
(with Elird Haxhiu)
This paper studies difference-in-differences (DD) research designs where all observations receive a continuous treatment (or dose) in response to an aggregate policy, so there is no group that is ex post unexposed. This setting stands in contrast to the recent literature re-examining DD estimators which typically requires that a subset of observations never receive the treatment to identify the Average Treatment Effect on the Treated (ATT). We develop a framework to estimate the treatment effect when the dose takes effect only after a cutoff value, the Minimum Effective Dose (MED), and introduce the average treatment effect on the effectively treated (ATET) as our target estimand. We propose a sample splitting estimator of the ATET and MED under non-parametric assumptions on the dose response function. First, in a hold-out sample, we borrow methods from the pharmacological literature to estimate the MED in a model selection step. This is then used to estimate the ATET with the remaining observations in a second step. This estimator is asymptotically conservative: it does not erroneously identify any treated units as untreated in the limit even if the MED is on the boundary of the parameter space, but as a result, it provides an attenuated estimate of the ATET. We use the bootstrap procedure in Efron (2014) to construct standard errors for the ATET estimate that reflect uncertainty over the value of the MED. Our simulations suggest that this estimator performs well in finite samples.
Women in Law and the Draft
(with Benjamin Pyle)
Between 1964 and 1973, women’s representation in full-time law school programs rose fivefold, from 3.7% to 20.1%. This paper examines whether Vietnam War draft policy contributed to this increase. In 1968, men enrolled in law school lost eligibility for 2-S student deferments, threatening law schools’ tuition revenues and incentivizing schools to admit more women to stabilize enrollment. To test this mechanism, we construct a school-by-year dataset of enrollment counts split by women/men and full-time/part-time status. Using a uniform adoption difference-in-differences design, we find that women’s representation rises by 2 percentage points in full-time programs relative to part-time programs (which were far less exposed to draft risk). This effect represents a 45% increase over women’s baseline representation of 4.5% in 1967. We further show that, after the draft, law schools more connected to undergraduate institutions transitioning from all-male to coeducational experienced larger increases in women’s enrollment. A shift-share analysis indicates that a one-standard-deviation increase in exposure to these coeducation transitions raised women’s first-year enrollment shares by 1-2 percentage points, highlighting the joint role of draft policy and expanding educational opportunity in accelerating women’s entry into law.