Make Piketty Happy

Better than an 80% marginal tax rate?  A fundamental law of economics is that there is a price to be paid for irrational decision making, so we're not surprised to find this in a piece by Ghazala Azmat and Barbara Petrongolo of Queen Mary University, London;

Despite a large body of lab evidence on individual preferences, experimental studies of gender and preferences at the team level is relatively scarce. One of the main problems with studying gender and groups is that groups are typically formed endogenously. Recent reforms that mandate certain levels of female representation on boards of directors offer a valuable, quasi-experimental setting to study the gender composition of teams and performance.

The first country to implement gender quota laws was Norway in 2003, followed by Spain, Finland, Iceland, and France. One study of the impact of female presence on boards on firm performance exploits the Norwegian reform, which requires listed companies to achieve 40% female board representation within two years. The research finds important effects of female board representation, notably that the constraints imposed by the quota implied a decline in stock prices and operating profits.

HSIB's bold in the above, of course.  We wonder if that would have any connection to our recent post where we noted the paucity of female Jeopardy champions.