Uta Bolt

ifo/CESifo Visiting Researcher

Uta Bolt, University of Bristol, CESifo Guest from 16 to 22 March 2025.

Gender Conformity and Later-Life Outcomes

In a recent NBER Working Paper, Uta Bolt, joint with S. Ayyar, E. Frence and C. O’Dea, has studied conformity of girls with gender norms, i.e. to what extent are essays written by girls in line with gender norms at the time. In order to establish their measure of gender-conformity, they used Word-Embedding Models. They estimated the associations of gender-conformity with lifetime earnings and found that those with higher gender-conformity earn significantly less later in life, even when controlled extensively for observables such as cognitive and non-cognitive skill, as well as family background.

Ms. Bolt’s main research interest is the development of inequalities over the lifecycle and across generations. Her research combines factor models of human capital development with structural dynamic lifecycle models. Her research agenda at CESifo will focus on human capital development from childhood to adulthood. She has recently started working with text data using Natural Language Processing, in particular applied to a large-scale data set of essays written by children. During her stay at CESifo, she hopes to advance a project that 1) measures creativity of individuals 2) estimates determinants of creativity and 3) estimates returns to creativity.

Uta Bolt is an Assistant Professor/Lecturer at the University of Bristol and a Research Associate at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. She holds a PhD in Economics, from University College London, an MRes in Economics from University College London, an MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science, an MSc in Modern Japanese Studies from the University of Oxford, a BSc in Economics from the University of Mannheim, and a BA in East Asian Studies from the University of Heidelberg.