LOGO

National quota policies have repeatedly been shown to be among the most effective measures for improving the representation of women in corporate management positions. Yet because quotas target specific roles, their effects may be confined to those positions and may not extend beyond entry into the sanctioned roles. This raises a central, yet understudied, question: do policies that target the representation of specific groups in specific positions have broader effects on workplace inequalities? Amid recent controversy surrounding Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion policies, addressing this question has become even more important. Moreover, understanding how, in what ways, and in which organizations broader impact materialize (or fail to materialize) deepens our knowledge of the institutional dynamics of organizational inequality. I present findings from my Dutch Science Foundation (NWO) project Beyond Boardrooms, which examines the causal impact of nationally mandated Dutch management quotas on the earnings gap between non‑managerial men and women, and on their relative position in the corporate wage distribution over a twelve‑year period. I discuss how these findings contribute to a sociological understanding of the consequences of targeted policies for organizational inequalities.

Programm

This study investigates the impact of Indonesia’s flagship conditional cash transfer (CCT) program—PKH—on violent crime. Exploiting data from a randomized controlled trial and administrative data from the staggered nationwide program roll-out in combination with different causal identification strategies, we show that communities receiving access to the CCT experienced an increase in violent crime.  Examining possible mechanisms, our analysis reveals that the program resulted in an increase in idleness among non-targeted male youth within beneficiary households, which we believe contributed to the rise in violent crime. In contrast, we show that the surge in violent crime is neither related to PKH increasing the (monetary and non-monetary) rewards for committing crime nor to alternative reductions in the (material, psychic, punishment-related) costs of engaging in crimes.

Krisztina Kis-Katos is Professor for International Economic Policy at the University of Göttingen. She studied Economics in Szeged and Konstanz, attended the Swiss Doctoral Program at the Study Center Gerzensee, and received her doctoral degree in Economics in 2010 at the University of Freiburg in Germany. Her research interests lie in the fields of applied development economics and political economy. Her recent research projects focus on the effects of (de-)globalization and more generally of macro-economic processes or related public policies on a range of social and economic outcomes, including labor market and firm outcomes, land use change and deforestation, or conflict.