Working Paper: NBER ID: w30987
Authors: Joel Waldfogel
Abstract: Women have traditionally participated in intellectual property creation at depressed rates relative to men. Book authorship is now an exception. In 1970, women published a third as many books as men. By 2020, women produced the majority of books. Adding new products can have significant welfare benefits, particularly when product quality is unpredictable. Using data on sales of 8.9 million individual titles at Amazon, 2018-2021, along with information on 200 million ratings of 1.8 million books by 800,000 Goodreads users, I develop measures of both the supply of new books by male and female authors, as well as their usage by heterogeneous consumers. I show that growth in female-authored books has delivered a roughly equal proportionate increase in the female-authored shares of consumption, book awards, and other measures of success, indicating both that the additional female-authored books are useful to consumers and that product quality is unpredictable. I calibrate a simple structural model of demand with unpredictable product quality to quantify the welfare benefit from the additional female-authored books. While revenue gains to female authors come partly at the expense of male authors, gains to consumers from inclusive innovation are experienced by a wide range of consumers.
Keywords: gender-inclusive; intellectual property; welfare effect; female authorship; book market
JEL Codes: J16; L82; O3
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| influx of female-authored books (Y92) | unique welfare benefits for consumers (D18) |
| growth in female-authored books (Y92) | increase in consumption of female-authored books (Y92) |
| influx of female-authored books (Y92) | increase in consumer surplus (D11) |
| growth in female authorship (J16) | increase in revenue for female authors (A19) |
| growth in female authorship (J16) | decrease in revenue for male authors (E25) |