Corinne Low

Corinne Low is an Assistant Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the Wharton School, specializing in family economics and economic development.  Her research brings together applied microeconomic theory with lab and field experiments to understand the determinants of who gets how much across gender and age lines. Current ongoing projects focus on the tradeoff women make between career and family in the US, the impact of teaching girls negotiation skills in Zambia, and how expanded access to in vitro fertilization affects women in Israel.

Corinne received her PhD in economics from Columbia University and her undergraduate degree in economics and public policy from Duke University, after which she worked as a consultant for McKinsey and Co. At Wharton, Corinne teaches Managerial Economics in the MBA program. 

Corinne Low (Working), Pricing the Biological Clock: Reproductive Capital on the US Marriage Market.

Abstract: Women's ability to have children declines sharply with age. This fecundity loss may negatively affect marital prospects for women who delay marriage to make career investments. I incorporate depreciating "reproductive capital" into a frictionless matching model of the marriage market, where highskilled women are likely to make premarital career investments. When the fertility costs of these investments are large relative to the income gains, the model predicts nonassortative matching at the top of the income distribution, with the highestearning men forgoing the highestearning women in favor of poorer, but younger, partners. However, if women's incomes rise or desired family size falls, highskilled women may be able to compensate their partners for lower fertility, leading to assortative matching. Patterns in US Census data match these predictions. In the 19201950 birth cohorts, women with postbachelors education match with lowerincome spouses than women with only college degrees, while in recent years this trend has reversed. The model relies on men internalizing their partners' expected fertility when choosing a mate. I test this using an online experiment where age is randomly assigned to dating profiles, to control for other factors (such as beauty) that change with age in observational data. I find that men, in contrast to women, have a strong preference for younger partners, but only when they have no children of their own and are aware of the agefertility tradeoff.

Tal Gross, Jeanne Lafortune, Corinne Low (2014), What Happens the Morning After? Access to Emergency Contraception and its Impact on Fertility and Abortion , Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 33.

MGEC 611 Microeconomics for Managers

MGEC 612 Microeconomics for Managers Advanced

Past Courses

BEPP900 RESEARCH SEMINAR

Of the many ways that doctoral students typically learn how to do research, two that are important are watching others give seminar presentations (as in Applied Economics Seminars) and presenting one's own research. The BEPP 900 course provides a venue for the latter. Wharton doctoral students enrolled in this course present applied economics research. Presentations both of papers assigned for other classes and of research leading toward a dissertation are appropriate in BEPP 900. This course aims to help students further develop a handson understanding of the research process. All doctoral students with applied microeconomic interests are encouraged to attend and present. Second and third year Applied Economic Ph.D. students are required to enroll in BEPP 900 and receive onesemester credit per year of participation.

MGEC611 MICROECONOMICS FOR MANAG

This course establishes the microeconomic foundations for understanding business decisionmaking. The course will cover consumer theory and market demand under full information, market equiolibrium and government intervention, production theory and cost optimization, producing in perfectly competitive and monopoly markets, vertical relations, and game theory, including simultaneous, sequential, and infinitely repreated games. Finally, we will wrapup game theory with an application to auctionsn. Students are expected to have mastered these materials before enrolling in the second quarter course: Microechomics for Managers: Advanced Applications.

MGEC612 MICROECON FOR MGR ADV.

This course will cover the economic foundations of business strategy and decisionmaking in market environments with other strategic actors and less than full information, as well as advanced pricing strategies. Topics include oligopoly models of market competition, creation, and protection, sophisticated pricing strategies for consumers with different valuations or consumers who buy multiple units (e.g. price discrimination, bundling, twopart tariffs), strategies for managing risk and making decisions under uncertainty, asymmetric information and its consequences for markets, and finally moral hazard and principleagent theory with application to incentive contacts.

“Tough But We’ll Thank You in 5 Years” MBA Core Curriculum Teaching Award, 2016 Teaching Commitment and Curricular Innovation Award (MBA Teaching), 2016 “Goes Above and Beyond the Call of Duty” MBA Core Curriculum Teaching Award, 2015 Raymond Vernon Memorial Award for best research article published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 2014 Description

Awarded for “What Happens the Morning After? The Costs and Benefits of Expanding Access to Emergency Contraception,” with Tal Gross and Jeanne Lafortune. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 33(1), 2014

Can’t Afford School? Girls Learn to Negotiate the Harvard Way, NPR 10/08/2015 Description

IVF availability ‘allows women to delay having babies and pursue careers’, The Guardian 08/22/2015 Description

Knowledge @ Wharton

• Building Diversity: The People That Analytics Often Leaves Behind, Knowledge @ Wharton 06/09/2017
• How Trump’s Election May Be Making Men More Aggressive, Knowledge @ Wharton 03/23/2017