In this paper, I construct a novel measure of misogyny using Google search trends on derogatory search terms for women. I show that this measure is an economically meaningful and statistically significant predictor of women’s labor market outcomes including the wage gap, full-time labor force participation, college degree attainment, and marriage and family planning decisions. These relationships hold up when I account for gender norms as measured by General Social Survey responses to questions about the roles of men and women in society. I also use my measure of misogyny to test whether data on the gender wage gap is consistent with either of two discrimination model frameworks and find that it most closely matches Black’s 1995 search model of discrimination.

In this paper, I propose the use of entropy to measure local sales tax complexity and find that increased complexity in state sales tax regimes results in higher prices even when the level of taxation is accounted for. To deal with the potential endogeneity of consumers responses to tax levels, I also construct local tax entropy on a synthetic bundle of goods that does not vary in response to tax complexity. I find that the state sales tax complexity does result in higher prices for consumers, likely because firms pass on the costs of complying with more complex tax regimes

Abstract: Sarcophyton glaucum is one of the most abundant and chemically studied soft corals with over 100 natural products reported in the literature, primarily cembrane diterpenoids. Yet, wide variation in the chemistry observed from S. glaucum over the past 50 years has led to its reputation as a capricious producer of bioactive metabolites. Recent molecular phylogenetic analysis revealed that S. glaucum is not a single species but a complex of at least seven genetically distinct species not distinguishable using traditional taxonomic criteria. We hypothesized that perceived intraspecific chemical variation observed in S. glaucum was actually due to differences between cryptic species (interspecific variation). To test this hypothesis, we collected Sarcophyton samples in Palau, performed molecular phylogenetic analysis, and prepared chemical profiles of sample extracts using gas chromatography-flame ionization detection. Both unsupervised (principal component analysis) and supervised (linear discriminant analysis) statistical analyses of these profiles revealed a strong relationship between cryptic species membership and chemical profiles. Liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry-based analysis using feature-based molecular networking permitted identification of the chemical drivers of this difference between clades, including cembranoid diterpenes (2R,11R,12R)-isosarcophytoxide (5), (2S,11R,12R)-isosarcophytoxide (6), and isosarcophine (7). Our results suggest that early chemical studies of Sarcophyton may have unknowingly conflated different cryptic species of S. glaucum, leading to apparently idiosyncratic chemical variation.