Download or read book Essays in Labor Economics on Marriage Education and Labor Supply written by Mary Ann Bronson and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation seeks to understand two main issues. The first issue concerns changes in the gender gaps in college attendance and choice of majors between 1960 and 2010. The second main issue concerns changes in the marriage rate in the US since the early twentieth century. The main objective of Chapters 1 and 2 is to answer the following two questions about educational choices: Why do women today invest in a college education at much higher rates than men, whereas fifty years ago men graduated more frequently? And given their high college attendance rates today, why do women continue to select disproportionately into lower-paying majors, with almost no gender convergence along this margin since the mid-1980s? In Chapter 1, I document first that changes in returns to skill over time and gender differences in wage premiums across majors cannot explain the observed gender gaps in educational choices. I then provide reduced-form evidence that two factors help explain the observed gender gaps: first, college degrees provide insurance against very low income for women, especially in case of divorce; second, majors differ substantially in the degree of "work-family flexibility" they offer, such as the size of wage penalties for temporary reductions in labor supply. Based on this reduced-form evidence, in Chapter 2 I construct and estimate a dynamic structural model of marriage, educational choices, and lifetime labor supply. I use the model to analyze the contribution of changes in wages and changes in the marriage market to the observed educational investment patterns over time. I estimate that the insurance value of the college degree for women in case of divorce is equivalent to about 31\% of the college wage premium. I also estimate that the share of women choosing high-return science and business majors would increase from 34\% to 45\% if wage penalties for labor supply reductions were equalized across occupations. Finally, I test the effects of two sets of policies on individuals' choice of major: a differential tuition policy that charges less for science and technical majors, as has been proposed in some states; and interventions intended to improve work-family flexibility. My results show that some family-friendly policies increase the share of women in science and business majors substantially, while others further widen both college gender gaps. Chapter 3, joint work with Maurizio Mazzocco, analyzes changes in U.S. marriage rates over nearly a century. We propose an explanation for these changes in three stages. First, we show that changes in cohort size alone can account for around 50 to 70\% of the variation in marriage rates since the 1930s for both black and white populations. Specifically, increases in cohort size reduce marriage rates, whereas declines in cohort size have the opposite effect. Using plausibly exogenous variation in access to oral contraceptives, and consequently the number of births, across states we provide evidence that the relationship between changes in cohort size and changes in marriage rates is causal. Next, we develop a dynamic search model of the marriage market that qualitatively generates this observed relationship, and derive a testable implication about cohort size's effect on spouses' age differences. Finally, we estimate the model and investigate its consistency with the data. We fail to reject it using the derived implication, and find that it can quantitatively explain much of the observed variation in marriage rates.

Download or read book Three Essays in Labor Economics written by Megan de Linde Leonard and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women, on average, are found in systematically different careers than men. The reason for this phenomenon is not fully understood, in part because expectations play a vital role in the process of career choice. Different religious groups have different beliefs on the importance of child bearing, so fertility expectations should differ by religious group. I include a woman's religious denomination in regressions on mea- sures of occupational flexibility. Jehovah's Witnesses choose the most flexible careers followed by Pentecostal, Catholic, Baptist, and Mainline Protestant women. Jewish women generally choose the least flexible careers. This is consistent with the human capital notion that women are choosing different careers than men rather than being forced into different job paths. If women are choosing jobs that allow them to take responsibility for home pro- duction, how does this affect their husbands? Male wage regressions that include marital status dummy variables find a marriage wage premium of 10 to 40%. This premium may occur because wives are taking responsibility for home production and husbands are free to focus their attention on productivity at work. It may also be that factors unobserved to the researcher may make a man more productive and more likely to marry. I use religious denomination as a proxy for specialization within the home. Men in more traditional religious denominations enjoy a higher marriage wage premium, which is evidence that household specialization of labor is an important cause of the wage premium. The choice of a career, whether to marry, and most other important life decisions are dependent on one's risk tolerance. The role of risk preferences in such choices is not fully understood, largely because relative risk aversion (y) is hard to empirically quantify. Chetty (2006) derives a formula for ° based on the link between utility and labor supply decisions. I estimate y at the micro level using the 1996 Panel Study of Income Dynamics. I compare y to an estimate based on hypothetical gambles and find the measures substantially different. This supports Chetty's claim that ex- pected utility theory cannot suffciently explain choices under uncertainty in different domains.

Download or read book Essays on Labor Economics written by Sunha Myong and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapter 1: Need-Based Aid from Selective Universities and the Achievement Gap between the Rich and Poor I study the role of need-based aid from selective universities in closing the achievement gap between the rich and poor high school students. I focus on the incentive aspect of need-based aid that can change high school student's effort choices. The impact of increasing need-based aid depends on the extent of borrowing constraints and how competition affects the relative performance of low- and high-income students. I develop a structural model of students' learning, application, and admission processes, and estimate it with the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002, a nationally representative sample. I control for other types of barriers for low-income students such as a lack of information or low high school quality. I use a geographic variation in costs of attending home-state nonselective universities to control selection biases driven by an unobservable characteristic correlated with family income. I find that 6.9% of high-ability low-income students do not apply to selective universities because of borrowing constraints. If selective universities double the amount of grants per attending student from the bottom quintile of the income distribution, the effort gap, as measured by the number of Advanced Placement (AP) classes taken, decreases by 33.4%, the achievement gap, as measured by the SAT score, by 20.2%, and the wage gap by 10.2% among students with the initial test scores in the top 20th percentile in 10th grade. The aggregate achievement score also increases because elevated competition raises the effort level of high-ability applicants from all income backgrounds. Chapter 2: Returns to College Education for Women, Assortative Marriage Matching, and Home Production I estimate returns to college education for women, accounting for how assortative marriage matching and the home production affect labor supply and fertility choice, based on the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 and the NLSY79 Child/Young Adults 1986-2012. First, the gain from home production, as measured by the average educational outcome of children, explains more than 80% of the total return. The direct impact of women's college education on children's outcome is much larger than the indirect effect through the household income and time investment. Women's college attainment rates would decrease by 8% without assortative marriage matching and by 17% without the direct impact on children's educational attainment. Second, assortative marriage matching accounts for 21% of returns to college education for women with average characteristics. High-ability students benefit more from the assortative marriage matching than low-ability students. For low-ability students, assortative marriage matching increases the inequality in college attainment rates by family backgrounds. Finally, women's labor force participation rates would increase by 24% if the marginal productivity of household income on children's outcome increases by 10%. As a comparison, if the wage structure of women were to be the same as men, the labor force participation rate would increase by 8%.

Download or read book Three Essays on Labor Supply and Education written by Ali Murat Berker and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Labor Economics written by Eva Olimpia Arceo Gomez and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Labor Economics written by Evan Nelson Buntrock and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The three essays of this dissertation are studies of individual choice and outcomes in labor-economics related problems. In the first chapter, I use an individual's rank in his coworker-comparison group to predict whether he leaves his job and the amount of earnings growth he will experience over his next few years. Even after controlling for a variety of individual and firm observables and unobservables, I find that an individual's rank is positively correlated with his earnings growth on the current job but negatively correlated with his earnings growth when he changes jobs. The mean reversion of job changers' earnings with respect to rank suggests that rank is a signal of an individual's match productivity with his current firm. In the second chapter, my co-author and I use a flexible decomposition procedure for job-matching to distinguish changes in job-to-job flows due to structural factors of the labor market from changes due to the evolving composition of workers and firms. We find that the likelihood of workers moving to firms 25-100 miles away from their current firm when changing jobs has increased. This increased integration of local labor markets has gone undetected by other studies of mobility, which focus on interstate and even inter-county job and residential migration. In the third chapter, I study whether US citizens have become more or less likely over time to marry someone with whom they share a state of birth. Using a variety of descriptive statistics, I find that the proportion of marriages between citizens with different states of birth has increased. Individuals born in later years and those having higher education are generally more likely to marry someone born in a different state.

Download or read book Essays in Labor Economics written by Guy Michaels (Ph. D.) and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Cont.) The increased demand for clerks likely contributed to the subsequent onset of the High School Movement. Interestingly, recent changes in IT have enabled firms to substitute computers for clerks, and I find evidence that this substitution occurred at a faster rate in more complex industries. The third chapter, coauthored with Liz Ananat, examines the effect of marital breakup on the economic outcomes of women with children. We find that having a female firstborn child increases the probability that a woman's first marriage ends in divorce. Using this exogenous variation we find that divorce has little effect on a woman's average household income, but it does increase the probability that her household ends up in the lowest income quartile. While women partially offset the loss of spousal earnings by receiving more child support and welfare, combining households, and increasing their labor supply, divorce still increases the odds of household poverty.

Download or read book Essays in Labor Economics written by Andriana Bellou and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Labor Economics written by Michael T. Baker and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Labor and Education Economics written by Alexander Lars Philip Willén and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays, each using advanced empirical methods to address important questions within the fields of labor and education economics. In Chapter 1, I exploit a Swedish reform that eliminated the fixed national pay scale for teachers to present novel evidence on the labor market effects of wage decentralization. Identification of the causal effect of the reform is achieved by using differences in non-teacher wages across local labor markets prior to the reform as a measure of treatment intensity in a dose-response difference-in-difference framework. I find that decentralization induces large changes in teacher pay, and that these changes are entirely financed through a reallocation of existing education resources. The magnitude of the wage effect is negatively related to teacher age, such that the reform led to a disproportionate increase in entry wage and a flattening of the age-wage relationship. Contrary to the predictions of the Roy model, decentralization does not impact teacher composition or student outcomes. I show that a main reason for this relates to general equilibrium and wage spillover effects to substitute occupations. In Chapter 2, which is joint work with Anders Böhlmark, we examine how ethnic residential segregation affects long-term outcomes of immigrants and natives. The key challenge with identifying neighborhood effects is that individuals sort across regions for reasons that are unobserved by the researcher but relevant as determinants of individual outcomes. Such nonrandom selection leads to invalid inference in correlational studies since individuals in neighborhoods with different population compositions are not comparable even after adjusting for differences in observable characteristics. To overcome this issue, we borrow theoretical insight from the one-sided tipping point model used by Card, Mas and Rothstein (2008). This model predicts that residential segregation can arise due to social interactions in white preferences: once the minority share in a neighborhood passes a certain “tipping point,” the neighborhood will be subject to white flight and avoidance, causing a discontinuity in white population growth. After having found evidence for the tipping phenomenon in Sweden, we use the tipping threshold as a source of exogenous variation in population composition to provide new evidence on the effect of neighborhood segregation on individual outcomes. We find negative effects on the educational attainment of native children. These effects are temporary and do not carry over to the labor market. We show that these transitory education effects are isolated to natives who leave tipped areas, suggesting that they may be driven by short-term disruptions caused by moving. In Chapter 3, which is joint work with Michael Lovenheim, we analyze the effect of teacher collective bargaining laws on long-run labor market and educational attainment outcomes, exploiting the timing of passage of duty-to-bargain (DTB) laws across cohorts within states and across states over time. We find robust evidence that exposure to teacher DTB laws worsens the future labor market outcomes of men: in the first 10 years after passage of a DTB law, male earnings decline by $1,974 (or 3.64%) per year and h.

Download or read book Three Essays on Labor Economics written by Erin Kathleen Kaplan and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Further, we analyze the effect unilateral and no-fault divorce laws have on the birth rate among women with different demographic characteristics such as age, marital status, and level of education. We find that unilateral divorce laws result in a decrease in birthrates among married women. Additionally, there aredistributional effects of no-fault divorce laws across age groups, with a significant positive effect on the birthrate among women aged 15 to 29.

Download or read book Essays in Labor Economics written by John M. McAdams and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays in labor economics. The first chapter tackles a classic problem in labor economics: estimating the returns to schooling. Compulsory schooling laws have been used extensively as an instrument for years of completed schooling in estimating the causal effect of education on a number of outcomes. But pre-existing state-level trends in educational attainment induce a spurious positive relationship between educational attainment and compulsory schooling laws. An event study model reveals that the laws have no effect on the distribution of educational attainment, thus making them inappropriate as an instrument. The laws' ineffectiveness can be explained by non-compliance and by measurement error in the proxy used to assign the laws in typical micro datasets. The second chapter investigates the impact of school starting age policy on the propensity to commit crime. The timing of school entry will affect the maturity and readiness to learn of those whose entry decision is directly affected by the policy, and students who are not directly affected by changes in school entry policies may benefit from an older average cohort through positive peer effects. I find that a higher school starting age cutoff leads to lower rates of incarceration among both those directly affected by the laws and those who were only indirectly affected. However, the reduction in crime among those directly affected is smaller in magnitude, implying that delaying school entry is harmful with respect to crime outcomes. The third chapter examines whether expanding access to advanced coursework--in particular, Advanced Placement (AP) courses--in high school leads to greater student participation and changes in post-secondary outcomes. I study the receipt of two federal grants to expand student participation in AP within a large, urban school district. Exposure to the grant led to a 38 percent increase in average AP course taking, as well as higher enrollment at two-year colleges and persistence to the second year of college.

Download or read book Essays in Labor and Family Economics written by Maxwell Chenming Rong and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of four essays on labor economics with a particular focus on the causes and consequences of major life cycle choices such as marriage, occupational choice, and retirement. How do the consequential decisions that individuals make in these dimensions affect the kinds of risks they will face throughout their life, and how can they insure themselves against them? I study these questions with a mix of survey and administrative data, using a variety of structural and reduced-form methods. In the first chapter I study how sharing a workplace with one's spouse can affect the dynamics of household income growth and risk, shedding light on the relationship between worker mobility and monopsony power in the labor market. There has been a large empirical literature documenting rent sharing between workers and firms: firms pass through performance shocks to the earnings of their employees, a fact inconsistent with perfectly competitive labor markets. This fact can be rationalized by monopsonistic models of labor markets where firm market power arises from imperfect worker mobility. An untested implication of these models is that firms should use the information available to them to infer differences in mobility for their workers and engage in price discrimination, resulting in differences in rent sharing. In this paper I provide novel evidence for this prediction by studying coworking couples: married couples who share an employer. Using Norwegian administrative data, I quantify differences in the pass-through of idiosyncratic firm shocks to coworking couples, and find that women in coworking couples experience less generous rent sharing: at any given level of firm performance, they have lower income growth than their non-coworking counterparts. These differences result in large differences in household income dynamics: coworking couples face lower average income growth and higher income risk, with substantial consequences for welfare. Firms exploit the fact that coworking couples are less mobile in order to engage in less generous rent sharing agreements, which explain a substantial fraction of the observed difference in income growth and risk. In the second chapter, I study the importance of liquid savings for smoothing consumption in the face of income shocks. I take advantage of a unique institutional feature of certain US retirement accounts, including Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs): prior to the age of 59.5, withdrawals from these accounts are subject to an additional 10\% tax penalty to discourage early withdrawal. Thus, IRAs undergo a sharp and predictable change in liquidity at age 59.5. Using survey data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), I document 3 facts. First, annual withdrawals from IRAs increase sharply by \$1,500 on average after age 59.5. Second, households with low liquid wealth in the form of checking and savings deposits have the largest proportional increases in withdrawals. Finally, IRA withdrawals increase in response to falls in income, but only for those with low liquid wealth. Using consumption data from the CAMS supplement to the HRS, I quantify how the increased liquidity of IRAs after age 59.5 helps households insure consumption against income shocks. In the third chapter, I study how workers of different skill levels are differentially affected by sudden job displacement events. Through a framework of general and occupation-specific human capital, I study the potential labor market consequences of a technology shock such as AI which displaces workers in high-skill occupations. Workers with high general human capital can partially insure themselves against job loss by switching occupations, but they also tend to be employed in occupations with high returns to specific human capital, meaning that their potential losses are much larger. To evaluate the relative size of these two forces, I specify and estimate a dynamic model of occupational choice, and use it to analyze the impact of a hypothetical job-destroying technology shock to high-skill occupations. Despite finding substantial ability of high skill workers to cushion the shock by switching occupations, the model predicts that a 40\% increase in the job destruction rate in high skill occupations results in average earnings losses of 2.4 to 5.4\% for workers in these occupations. These losses are substantially larger than the losses from an analogous shock in low skill occupations. In the fourth chapter, I document and seek to explain a novel fact about gender differences in the cyclicality of unemployment. Using historical Current Population Survey data, I show that after 1979, male unemployment became significantly more cyclical than female. I hypothesize that the reason for this increase is the drastic decline in male unionization rates from the 1980s to the present. I leverage the passage of right-to-work laws in 7 states that weakened the power of unions to test this hypothesis, and find mixed results. However, I also take advantage of the limited panel dimension of the CPS to directly compare the unemployment cyclicality of unionized and non-unionized workers. I show that due to the drastic decrease in male unionization relative to female, even a small difference in union cyclicality can explain a great deal of the gender unemployment cyclicality gap.

Download or read book Essays on Labor Economics and Inequality written by Meng-Chien Su and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Chapter 1, I develop a random search model incorporating marriage decisions, fertility shocks, and human capital accumulation to examine the mechanisms underlying wage and employment differences between men and women over their life-cycles. The model assumes that men and women are mostly identical, with women bearing child-rearing responsibilities in a gender-heterogeneous labor market. When single, workers search for jobs and marriage partners individually; when married, they search for jobs jointly as a household. The household search and exogenous fertility shocks are the primary factors contributing to the life-cycle employment patterns observed in the NLSY97 data. Child-rearing responsibilities amount to approximately 39.83 hours per week, a significant portion of the 80 hours available to each worker, leading to a decline in women's employment rates and full-time working status. Initial gender wage gaps stem from gender-specific wage offer distributions, with human capital accumulation as the main factor widening these gaps over time. Counterfactual policy experiments indicate that a gender-neutral hiring process could eliminate wage gaps, while 10 hours of government-funded childcare services per week could eliminate employment differences. In Chapter 2, I investigate the impact of prejudiced sentiments on wage disparities between homosexual and heterosexual men. I develop a random search model that incorporates taste-based prejudice, bargaining, and migration. The findings reveal that prejudice significantly contributes to predicting empirical earnings and employment patterns. Despite homosexual workers exhibiting the same conditional mean productivity as their heterosexual counterparts, they earn less than 80% of their productivity value due to prejudice. This prejudice results in an average monetary loss of 4 dollars per hour for homosexual workers. Based on the estimates, a modest tax of 0.09 dollars per hour of work on heterosexual men is determined to be sufficient to compensate for this loss.

Download or read book Essays on Labor Economics written by Lu Liu and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation contributes towards our understanding of Labor Economics and Applied Econometrics. It consists of three chapters. The first two chapters shed light on the determinants of female labor supply behavior by connecting theory to household-level data. The third chapter studies the nonlinear generalized method of moments (GMM) in dynamic panels and its application to value-added models of learning. In Chapter 1, I propose that the rising sex ratio (number of males per female) imbalance has been an important factor in the recent feminization of rural-to-urban migration in China. To establish this connection, I first develop a three-player noncooperative household model in which both the parents and the daughter contribute time or money to improve the well-being of sons. The local sex ratio can affect the players' choices via two channels: either by influencing the preference towards sons, or by imposing negative impact on sons' welfare due to intensified marriage market competition. My model predicts that daughters are more likely to participate in migratory work when the local sex ratio is higher. Drawing on data from Rural-Urban Migration in China Survey, I then test the hypothesis by comparing unmarried rural women with brothers and those without brothers when conditioning on family size. My identification strategy exploits the exogenous variation in the number of brothers a rural woman has that comes from the randomness in parental sibling structure. I show that an increase in the local sex ratio significantly raises the probability of becoming a migrant worker for unmarried rural women who have brothers, while no significant effect is observed among those without brothers. The positive link is stronger for rural women who have a larger number of brothers or whose brothers are relatively younger. I also discover that around 40% of the increase in rural female labor migration rate from 1990 to 2000 could be explained by the changes in the sex ratio. I further find evidence in favor of the marriage market pressure mechanism. Chapter 2 (joint work with Zhongda Li) examines the intergenerational determinants of women's labor force participation decision. Existing studies have established a positive correlation between a married woman's work behavior and her mother-in-law's. Such linkage is attributable to the profound influence of maternal employment on son's gender role preferences or household productivity. In this chapter we investigate the relative importance of the two potential mechanisms using the Chinese survey data. We show that a substantive part of the intergenerational correlation is left unexplained even if we control for the husband's gender role attitudes. Instead, we find that the husband's household productivity is more crucial in the wife's work decision, suggesting the dominance of the endowment channel over the preference channel. Chapter 3 develops a novel framework for constructing nonlinear moment conditions in dynamic panel data models. I demonstrate that the nonlinear GMM estimator considerably mitigates the classical weak identification problem arising from two data generating processes: (i) the autoregressive parameter is close to the unit circle; (ii) the ratio of variances of individual heterogeneity and idiosyncratic errors diverges to infinity. I further derive analytical expressions for the bias term of the linear and nonlinear GMM estimators, and show that the use of nonlinear moments results in smaller finite sample bias. In simulation studies, the nonlinear GMM estimator performs well compared to both the difference and system GMM estimators. As an empirical illustration, I estimate the effect of class size reduction and private school attendance on student academic achievement using a value-added model with learning dynamics.

Download or read book Essays in Labor Economics and the Economics of Education written by Seth D. Zimmerman and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Matching with Transfers written by Pierre-André Chiappori and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-30 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past few decades, matching models, which use mathematical frameworks to analyze allocation mechanisms for heterogeneous products and individuals, have attracted renewed attention in both theoretical and applied economics. These models have been used in many contexts, from labor markets to organ donations, but recent work has tended to focus on "nontransferable" cases rather than matching models with transfers. In this important book, Pierre-André Chiappori fills a gap in the literature by presenting a clear and elegant overview of matching with transfers and provides a set of tools that enable the analysis of matching patterns in equilibrium, as well as a series of extensions. He then applies these tools to the field of family economics and shows how analysis of matching patterns and of the incentives thus generated can contribute to our understanding of long-term economic trends, including inequality and the demand for higher education.