Ragan Petrie

College Choices and Bargaining Outcomes

At CESifo, Ragan Petrie will work on projects investigating choosing a college major and gender differences in bargaining. In the first project, she and her co-authors examine how beliefs on potential earnings, teaching quality and climate and inclusion interact with survey information on earnings and peer-provided information on climate and teaching to affect final major choice in college. In the second project, she and her co-author examine the effect of communication architecture on bargaining outcomes. Women tend to face worse outcomes than men in negotiations, and this may partially explain the observed gender wage gap.

Ms. Petrie is an applied microeconomist who uses behavioral and experimental approaches to study topics in public and labor economics, including motives for charitable giving and other prosocial behavior, gender differences in bargaining and competition, discrimination, social media and the economic preferences of children and their impact on long-run educational outcomes. Her research has been published in the Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review, Economic Journal, Journal of Public Economics and Journal of Economic Literature. She is a co-editor at Experimental Economics. Media coverage of her research includes the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Chronicle of Philanthropy and Australian Financial Review.  

Ragan Petrie is a Professor in the Department of Economics at Texas A&M University. She is also a Professorial Fellow at the Melbourne Institute at University of Melbourne in Australia, where she served on the Steering Committee for the monthly Taking the Pulse of the Nation survey. She is a co-editor at Experimental Economics. Media coverage of her research includes the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Chronicle of Philanthropy and Australian Financial Review. She has received grant funding from the National Science Foundation, the Science of Philanthropy Initiative and the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Foundation. Her PhD in Economics is from University of Wisconsin-Madison.