Caitlin Knowles Myers
Contact

Assistant Professor
Department of Economics
Middlebury College
Middlebury, VT 05753
cmyers@middlebury.edu

CV
About me

Caitlin Knowles Myers is an assistant professor of economics at Middlebury College and a research fellow with the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn, Germany. She graduated from Tulane University in New Orleans and received her doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin. She joined the Middlebury faculty in 2005.

Myers' research has focused on issues related to gender, race, and the economy. Her work has been published in scholarly journals including the Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Public Economics, Economic Inquiry, and Journal of Urban Economics and has been featured by media outlets such as Slate.com, The Financial Times, NPR, and MSNBC. Professor Myers' current research examines the social and economic effects of policies governing young women's access to reproductive control. She teaches courses on labor economics, urban economics, the economics of discrimination, and empirical methods.

Myers is a widow with two young sons, Finn (born in 2007) and Cullen (born in 2009).

Research

Current Projects

"Young women's access to abortion and contraception, 1960-present"

"Power of the pill or power of abortion? Re-examining the effects of young women's access to reproductive control" (under revision for the Journal of Political Economy

Here is a blog post about it from Berk Ozler at the World Bank

"The effects of parental involvement laws on teen fertility"

"Twins, testosterone, and the gender wage gap" (With Anne Gielen and Jessica Holmes)

Published Papers

Retail redlining: Are gasoline prices higher in poor and minority neighborhoods?
With Grace Close, Laurice Fox, John William Meyer, and Madeline Niemi (all students in my Winter 2009course on discrimination). Economic Inquiry, 2011, 49(3): 795-809.

Why volunteer? Evidence on the roles of altruism, reputation, and incentives.
With Jeffrey Carpenter. Journal of Public Economics, 2010, 94(11-12): 911-920.

Two food assisted maternal and child health nutrition programs help mitigate the impact of economic hardship on child stunting in Haiti
With Shannon Donegan, John Maluccio, Prunima Menon, Marie Ruel, and Jean-Pierre Habicht. Journal of Nutrition, 2010, 140(6): 1139-1145.

Ladies first? A field study of discrimination in coffee shops
Marcus Bellows, Hiba Fakhoury, Douglas Hale, Alexander Hall, and Kaitlin Ofman (all students in my Winter Term 2007 course on discrimination). Applied Economics, 2010, 42(14): 1761-1769.

This paper has received considerable media attention. Here is an article about it in Slate , and here is a response to some of the comments and questions I've received. Here is the data set in Stata format and the program file for the results in the paper.

Discrimination as a competitive device: The case of local television news
The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy (Contributions), 2008, 8(1).

Cues for timing and coordination: Latitude, longitude, and Letterman
With Daniel Hamermesh and Mark Pocock Journal of Labor Economics, 2008, 26(2): 223-246.
Here is an article about it in Slate

Altruistic behavior in a representative dictator experiment
With Jeffrey Carpenter and Cristina Connolly Experimental Economics, 2008, 11(3): 282-298.

A Cure for discrimination? Affirmative action and the case of California's Proposition 209
Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 2007, 60(3): 379-396.

Discrimination and neighborhood effects: Understanding racial differential in U.S. housing prices
Journal of Urban Economics, 2004, 56(2): 279-302.