Download or read book Essays on Gender Gaps and Investments in Children written by Na'ama Shenhav and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is a compilation of three essays that investigate how increasing women's access to political and economics resources in the United States influences investments in the human capital of children and helps shape decisions around family formation in the country. In doing so, it documents the evolution of decision making of women in the U.S. over the last century, and shows how key shifts in policy and wage-enhancing technological change facilitated this transition. The essays pair cutting-edge econometric techniques with novel empirical designs to estimate causal impacts of women's increasing access to these resources. The first chapter examines the effect of the enfranchisement of women in early 20th century United States on the long term educational outcomes of children growing up during and after the passage of suffrage laws, and is co-authored with Esra Kose and Elira Kuka. This essay contributes to a growing literature which provides evidence that increasing the political power of women leads to a growth in investments in children in the short term; but which thus far has not measured the long-term implications on children's "success", in particular for the educational attainment of individuals. We investigate the effect of women's political empowerment on the human capital of children by exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in U.S. state and federal suffrage laws. We estimate that exposure to women's suffrage during childhood leads to large increases in educational attainment for children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, in particular blacks and Southern whites. The results suggest that the redistribution of resources following suffrage contributed to a convergence of educational outcomes by raising the attainment of groups with low baseline levels of education. The second chapter establishes a credible link between the significant reduction in the gender wage gap between 1980 and 2010 and the coinciding shifts in family structure. It is motivated by the fact that family structure in the United States has shifted substantially over the last three decades, yet the causes and implications of these changes for the well-being of family members remains unclear. The empirical strategy exploits task-based shifts in demand as an exogenous shock to sex-specific wages to demonstrate the role of the relative female to male wage in the family and labor market outcomes of women. The results show that increases in the relative wage lead to a decline in the likelihood of marriage for those on the margin of a first marriage, and present suggestive evidence that these effects are concentrated among less-desirable matches. A higher relative wage also causes women to increase their hours of work, reduce their dependence on a male earner, and increase the likelihood of that they raise children outside of marriage. These findings indicate that improvements in the relative wage have facilitated women's independence by reducing the monetary incentive for marriage, and can account for 20% of the decline in marriage between 1980 and 2010. The third chapter builds on the findings made in the first two chapters, and explores the implications of changes in male and female wage opportunities for child achievement. It contributes to a large literature that has shown that a child's academic success and physical development are strongly influenced by family income, but which has less evidence on whether whether the source of income also matters. The empirical strategy takes advantage of national shifts in the return to occupations over this time period as a source of exogenous convergence of wages across sexes in a marriage market. In contrast to previous findings, the results do not show that a higher female to male wage ratio significantly improves children's outcomes, although the confidence intervals allow for an important positive or negative effect. Auxiliary analyses which use observed relative household income produce a qualitatively different, negative and statistically significant effect of relative wages on children's development, which is likely a reflection of an omitted variable bias. Sources of the imprecision in the estimation are discussed.

Download or read book Essays on Higher Education and Gender Gap in Investments in Children s Health and Education written by Haige Yuan and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Gender Equality and Inclusive Growth written by Raquel Fernández and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2021-03-04 with total page 50 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper considers various dimensions and sources of gender inequality and presents policies and best practices to address these. With women accounting for fifty percent of the global population, inclusive growth can only be achieved if it promotes gender equality. Despite recent progress, gender gaps remain across all stages of life, including before birth, and negatively impact health, education, and economic outcomes for women. The roadmap to gender equality has to rely on legal framework reforms, policies to promote equal access, and efforts to tackle entrenched social norms. These need to be set in the context of arising new trends such as digitalization, climate change, as well as shocks such as pandemics.

Download or read book Parental Investments in Early Childhood and the Gender Gap in Math and Literacy written by Amanda Chuan and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Parental investments at early ages can shape children's future educational specializations. Using a longitudinal study, we find that parents invest more in daughters than sons at ages 3-5. Moreover, parents' beliefs about their children's reading and math abilities are higher for girls than boys. We examine how these behaviors and beliefs predict children's academic performance 4-6 years later. We find that early parental investment and beliefs lead to persistently higher English scores for girls than boys in grades 3-5. However, there is no gender gap in math scores. The results suggest that parental beliefs and behaviors at ages 3-5 contribute to girls' advantage in English but have little impact on math. In our data, parents' investments appear to be domain-specific, giving girls an advantage in reading that does not transfer to math. Since math skills are foundational for economics and STEM, these investments may be more effective in promoting skills for the arts over economics and STEM. If parents invest more in girls and early skill development shapes students' later educational decisions, the greater effectiveness of parental investment in readingthan math may lead women to favor the arts over economics or STEM fields later on.

Download or read book Family Investments in Children s Potential written by Ariel Kalil and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2004-07-22 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The papers in this volume bring together a cross-disciplinary mix of researchers--developmental psychologists, evolutionary biologists, economists, anthropologists, and sociologists--working on the common theme of investments in children. The interdisciplinary conceptual framework adopted by this collection of papers is loosely built around the idea that there are two broad dimensions of parental investments. These include resources (e.g., income, wealth) on the one hand, and behaviors (e.g., parental instrumental support and parental activities that promote warmth, socialization, and cognitive stimulation) on the other. Believing that parental investments yield a "return" in improved child and young adult outcomes, the papers discuss how parents differ in terms of the resources they have available to invest, the choices parents make, the behaviors they engage in, and relevant policy and program interventions. More specifically, core questions addressed by the authors include: Why do some families invest while others do not and are differential investment patterns related to biology, economics, or social factors? What constitutes a successful "investment portfolio?" How are "investments" measured and/or characterized? Are different investments interchangeable, compensating, or off-setting? Given a set of resources, why are some families able to make more effective investments in child outcomes? How well do these investments affect outcomes for children and for these children as young adults? Can interventions or public policies help families build assets or become "better" investors in their children's potential? Developing a better understanding of what investments matter, when they matter, and how resources can be successfully invested in children's potential is key to shaping efficient interventions and social policies. Knowledge of how parents invest and what strategies are effective may help policies which seek to further empower and enable parental involvement and choice for their children.

Download or read book Essays on the Economics of Gender written by Melanie Sharon Wasserman and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis studies gender differences in educational and occupational outcomes. Chapter 1 examines whether the long work hours required by high-paying professions are a barrier to entry for women, who may face a tradeoff between market time demands and family formation. I study the introduction of a policy that capped the average workweek for medical residents. I find that a reduction in a specialty's weekly residency hours induced women to enter, but yielded little change in men's entry. To shed light on why women and men responded differently to the reduction in hours, I analyze the effect of the reform on residents' fertility. I find that a reduction in a specialty's weekly hours increased the specialty's female fertility rate in California, and had no effect in Texas. I discuss these results using a model in which physicians choose between career and family investments during residency, trading off long term incomes, investments in children, and leisure. In Chapter 2, coauthored with David Autor, David Figlio, Krzysztof Karbownik, and Jeffrey Roth, we use birth certificates matched to schooling records for Florida children in order to assess whether family disadvantage disproportionately impedes the pre-market development of boys. We find that, relative to their sisters, boys born to disadvantaged families have higher rates of disciplinary problems, lower achievement scores, and fewer high-school completions. Evidence supports that this is a causal effect of the post-natal environment; family disadvantage is unrelated to the gender gap in neonatal health. We conclude that the gender gap among black children is larger than among white children in substantial part because black children are raised in more disadvantaged families. Chapter 3 explores why women remain underrepresented in elective offices, by investigating whether there are gender differences in the persistence of politicians in response to an electoral loss. Using California local election returns and a regression discontinuity design, I analyze the subsequent political involvement of men and women who ran in close elections. I find that losing an initial election induces substantially more attrition among female than male candidates.

Download or read book Gender and Parenthood written by W. Bradford Wilcox and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-12 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this collection deploy biological and social scientific perspectives to evaluate the transformative experience of parenthood for today's women and men. They map the similar and distinct roles mothers and fathers play in their children's lives and measure the effect of gendered parenting on child well-being, work and family arrangements, and the quality of couples' relationships. Contributors describe what happens to brains and bodies when women become mothers and men become fathers; whether the stakes are the same or different for each sex; why, across history and cultures, women are typically more involved in childcare than men; why some fathers are strongly present in their children's lives while others are not; and how the various commitments men and women make to parenting shape their approaches to paid work and romantic relationships. Considering recent changes in men's and women's familial duties, the growing number of single-parent families, and the impassioned tenor of same-sex marriage debates, this book adds sound scientific and theoretical insight to these issues, constituting a standout resource for those interested in the causes and consequences of contemporary gendered parenthood.

Download or read book Essays on Public Investments in Children written by Esra Kose and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines the impact of childhood exposure to public investments on later life outcomes from the lenses of changes in the political landscape due to women's enfranchisement and increases in early childhood education investments. Chapter 1, joint with Elira Kuka and Na'ama Shenhav, examines the long-term impact of women's political empowerment on children's educational outcomes following the suffrage laws in the early 1900s in the U.S. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in U.S. state and federal suffrage laws, we find that exposure to women's enfranchisement during childhood leads to large increases in educational attainment for children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, in particular blacks and Southern whites. We show that the educational gains are plausibly driven by the rise in public expenditures following suffrage. Our findings contribute to the first long-term estimates of a broad-based expansion of women's political power. Chapter 2 analyzes the impact of the Head Start program on academic achievement by exploiting a new source of variation in program funding intensity across local communities and over time during the 1990s. Head Start is the largest federal preschool program that provides education, health, nutrition, and other social services to low-income children age three to five and their families. Since its inception in 1965, Head Start has been a key intervention for reducing educational gaps across socioeconomic groups in school readiness. However, its impact on test scores remains unclear. Using student-level data from Texas, I find that exposure to more generous Head Start funding at age four significantly improves test scores in third grade through fifth grade for low-income children. My results show that Head Start benefited Hispanics with limited language proficiency the most. I provide quantitative evidence that Head Start significantly improves language proficiency among Hispanics, which could partly explain the test score gains in this group. I also show that the gains in test scores can be explained by an increase in both program quality and capacity. These findings contrast to the previous literature, which reports smaller or no detectable impacts on children's test scores over the medium-run and contribute to the extensive literature that evaluates Head Start's effectiveness. Finally, Chapter 3 examines the intergenerational impact of Head Start on infant health. Head Start has served low-income children over 50 years and has been shown to be a success in improving long-term outcomes of children who participated the early phases program. This paper evaluates the effects of maternal access to Head Start on infant health outcomes using Vital Statistics Natality data. Using variation in the year of Head Start's introduction in each county from 1966 to 1970, I find that maternal access to Head Start at ages three to five improves infant health for both whites and blacks, with larger impacts on blacks. It also increases the probability that a new mother is more educated, reduces the number of births, reduces likelihood of smoking and drinking during pregnancy. These findings suggest that the estimates of the returns to early childhood programs may significantly understate the total benefit.

Download or read book How to Achieve Inclusive Growth written by Valerie Cerra and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-22 with total page 901 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Rising inequality and widespread poverty, social unrest and polarization, gender and ethnic disparities, declining social mobility, economic fragility, unbalanced growth due to technology and globalization, and existential danger from climate change are urgent global concerns of our day. These issues are intertwined. They therefore require a holistic framework to examine their interplay and bring the various strands together. Leading academic economists have partnered with experts from several international institutions to explain the sources and scale of these challenges. They gather a wide array of empirical evidence and country experiences to lay out practical policy solutions and to devise a comprehensive and unified plan of action for combatting these economic and social disparities. This authoritative book is accessible to policy makers, students, and the general public interested in how to craft a brighter future by building a sustainable, green, and inclusive society in the years ahead.

Download or read book Essays on Labor and Health Economics written by Chen Zhao and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first essay looks how the disability wage gap as well as the gender, race, and ethnicity wage gaps are affected by macroeconomic conditions. Even though a large literature looks at the trends of these wage gaps, very little research considers their cyclicality. I use the SIPP linked to administrative earnings records to look at how these gaps vary with local labor market conditions from 1978 to 2010. For annual earnings, the disabled and blacks seem to fare better than their counterparts as labor market conditions worsen while women seem to fare worse than men, and the results are mixed for Hispanics. For hourly earnings, the results are largely mixed and inconclusive. There is also evidence that these results vary by decade. The second essay asks whether the gender gap in total compensation is smaller than the gender wage gap. One potential explanation for the observed gender wage gap is that men and women value the nonwage aspects of a job differently. I construct two individual level measures of total compensation - one using supplemental CPS data on employer contribution to health insurance premiums and one using the NLSY linked to employer cost data. I find that the observed gender gap resulting from these measures of total compensation is almost identical to the observed gender gap in wages. The third essay considers how parents allocate scarce resources among children with different levels of initial endowment. Parents that are interested in maximizing the return on their investment might reinforce initial conditions, but parents motivated by equity might compensate. I use the SIPP to directly measured health endowment as whether the child has any health conditions and parental investment as the frequency with which parents do various activities with each child. The results show that there is some evidence that parents do not invest equally in children of different health endowments, but the evidence is far from overwhelming. Moreover, the results differ depending on parents' education and the children's age group. In general, these results seem to indicate that pattern of parental behavior depends crucially on the specific investment.

Download or read book Three Essays in Development Economics written by David Russell Hansen and published by Stanford University. This book was released on 2011 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is composed of three chapters. All three deal with topics in development economics. The first chapter examines the effects on village institutions of introducing formal financial institution options into the village. The second addresses the effects of government policy on educational investment and crime. The third tests the explanatory power of various explanations of the gender gap in math test scores. The first chapter examines the effects of a transition from a ``traditional'' economy based on an uncertain source of income, with risk fully insured away by one's neighbors in a social network through costly network ties, to a ``modern'' economy in which some agents have access to partial insurance at a lower cost. A theoretical model is used to show that village social networks can break down as some members of the village no longer need the insurance the social network provides, producing a reduction in welfare (if the costs of reducing moral hazard are not too high) for at least some individuals and possibly the village as a whole. This loss of welfare can occur even when networks provide other benefits to those belonging to them and is likely to be heterogeneous, depending on the opportunities and networks available to individuals. This paper tests these predictions using Indonesian data to examine the effect of a change in the banking institutions available to a community on the strength of social networks (measured by community participation) and welfare (measured by household expenditure and by child health). The analysis finds that changing financial institution availability in general does not influence community participation or welfare, but that financial institutions that primarily serve certain groups do relatively reduce the welfare of households not in those groups, which is consistent with the hypotheses generated by the model. Crime is an important feature of economic life in many countries, especially in the developing world. Crime distorts many economic decisions because it acts like an unpredictable tax on earnings. In particular, the threat of crime may influence people's willingness to invest in schooling or physical capital. The second chapter explores the questions "What influence do crime rates and levels of investment have on one another?" and "How do government policies affect the relationship between investment and crime?" by creating a simple structural model of crime and educational investment and attempting to fit this model to Mexican data. A method of simulated moments procedure is used to estimate parameters of the model and the estimated parameters are then used to carry out policy simulations. The simulations show that increasing spending on police or increasing the severity of punishment reduces crime but has little effect on educational investment. Increased educational subsidies increase educational investment but reduce crime only slightly. Thus, one type of policy is insufficient to accomplish the goals of both reducing crime and increasing education. The third chapter is joint work with Prashant Bharadwaj, Giacomo De Giorgi, and Christopher Neilson. Boys tend to have better performances than girls in mathematical testing; in particular, there are significantly more boys than girls among high achievers and the score distribution appears to have a longer right tail for boys. We confirm such results on several low- and middle-income countries. In particular we find that the gender gap is already present by age 10 and substantially increases by age 14 and 15. We propose and try to test a series of explanations for such a gap: (i) parental investment, (ii) ability, (iii) school resources, (iv) individual investment and effort (not tested directly), (v) competitive environment, and (vi) cultural norms. We conclude that none of our proposed explanations can account for a substantial portion of the gap.

Download or read book Does Character Matter written by Richard V. Reeves and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2015-05-15 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Reeves introduces this collection of short essays with a challenge: “I defy you to find a richer set of writings on the philosophical, empirical, and practical issues raised by a focus on character, and in particular its relationship to questions of opportunity.” The evidence? The works of sixteen thoughtful skeptics of and enthusiasts for the public endeavor of character cultivation. The authors in this collection provide differing political perspectives to give at least equal weight to the moral dimensions of character as well as strong demands to honor individual free will and individual development. This collection includes essays that draw attention to the gendered nature of character formation; stress the importance of culture and social norms; and explain the impact of chronic stress in the early years. Still others argue that the construction of a policy agenda for the cultivation of character poses a stark challenge to the partisan culture of contemporary politics, but may also alleviate it by reinvigoratingcommunity life. As Reeves writes, don’t take his word for it. Read the essays and see for yourself.

Download or read book Gender and Economics written by Jane Humphries and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 1995 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents 27 articles dating from 1923 to 1994 on gender differences, female labour supply, male-female wage differences and on the historical significance of women's work.

Download or read book Women Business and the Law 2021 written by World Bank and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2021-04-05 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women, Business and the Law 2021 is the seventh in a series of annual studies measuring the laws and regulations that affect women’s economic opportunity in 190 economies. The project presents eight indicators structured around women’s interactions with the law as they move through their lives and careers: Mobility, Workplace, Pay, Marriage, Parenthood, Entrepreneurship, Assets, and Pension. This year’s report updates all indicators as of October 1, 2020 and builds evidence of the links between legal gender equality and women’s economic inclusion. By examining the economic decisions women make throughout their working lives, as well as the pace of reform over the past 50 years, Women, Business and the Law 2021 makes an important contribution to research and policy discussions about the state of women’s economic empowerment. Prepared during a global pandemic that threatens progress toward gender equality, this edition also includes important findings on government responses to COVID-19 and pilot research related to childcare and women’s access to justice.

Download or read book Essays on Intrahousehold Allocation and the Family written by Alemayehu Azeze Ambel and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding the constraints that households face when making decisions on fertility, education, and health is beneficial for effective interventions aimed at enhancing investments in human capital, promoting gender equity, and reducing poverty. This dissertation consists of four essays that analyze the nature, performance, and determinants of fertility, child education, and nutritional status in a developing economy. The first essay identifies peculiar constraints, including gender preference and income uncertainty that households face when making fertility and schooling choices. The underlying assumption in the theoretical analysis is that in the absence of formal risk and capital markets, households may revert to informal risk sharing arrangements with their children. In addition, parents take into account gender differences in labor market outcomes. Given this premise, fertility and schooling choices are analyzed using expected utility and parental and children's lifetime income functions. The results show that gender preference augments the effect of income uncertainty on fertility. In this setting, family size and composition have gender-differentiated impacts on education. The second and third essays test the theoretical results using the Ethiopian Demographic and Health Survey data. The second essay estimates alternative specifications of count data models of lifetime fertility goals for different sample categories. The models are controlled for possible sample selection bias due to non-response in the data. Results confirm that the presence of gender preference augments the impact of income uncertainty on fertility, particularly in rural households. The third essay examines children's school enrollment status and highest grade attained. Results from binary and ordered probit as well as fixed effect models show that disaggregating the household by gender and age reveals important information on the relationship between family size and education. Most importantly, the effects of family size and composition are larger on the girls' education than on the boys'. The fourth essay analyzes the effect of maternal education and its pathways on child nutrition. The pathways examined are health-seeking behavior, knowledge of health and family planning, reproductive behavior, and socioeconomic status. Logistic regression results show that maternal education and its pathways are more relevant and robust in explaining chronic than acute child malnutrition.

Download or read book Gender Bias and Investments in Children written by James B. Davies and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Human Capital written by Xiaoyan Chen Youderian and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first essay considers how the timing of government education spending influences the intergenerational persistence of income. We build a life-cycle model where human capital is accumulated in early and late childhood. Both families and the government can increase the human capital of young agents by investing in education at each stage of childhood. Ability in each dynasty follows a stochastic process. Different abilities and resultant spending histories generate a stochastic steady state distribution of income. We calibrate our model to match aggregate statistics in terms of education expenditures, income persistence and inequality. We show that increasing government spending in early childhood education is effective in lowering intergenerational earnings elasticity. An increase in government funding of early childhood education equivalent to 0.8 percent of GDP reduces income persistence by 8.4 percent. We find that this relatively large effect is due to the weakening relationship between family income and education investment. Since this link is already weak in late childhood, allocating more public resources to late childhood education does not improve the intergenerational mobility of economic status. Furthermore, focusing more on late childhood may raise intergenerational persistence by amplifying the gap in human capital developed in early childhood. The second essay considers parental time investment in early childhood as an education input and explores the impact of early education policies on labor supply and human capital. I develop a five-period overlapping generations model where human capital formation is a multi-stage process. An agent's human capital is accumulated through early and late childhood. Parents make income and time allocation decisions in response to government expenditures and parental leave policies. The model is calibrated to the U.S. economy so that the generated data matches the Gini index and parental participation in education expenditures. The general equilibrium environment shows that subsidizing private education spending and adopting paid parental leave are both effective at increasing human capital. These two policies give parents incentives to increase physical and time investment, respectively. Labor supply decreases due to the introduction of paid parental leave as intended. In addition, low-wage earners are most responsive to parental leave by working less and spending more time with children. The third essay is on the motherhood wage penalty. There is substantial evidence that women with children bear a wage penalty of 5 to 10 percent due to their motherhood status. This wage gap is usually estimated by comparing the wages of working mothers to childless women after controlling for human capital and individual characteristics. This method runs into the problem of selection bias by excluding non-working women. This paper addresses the issue in two ways. First, I develop a simple model of fertility and labor participation decisions to examine the relationships among fertility, employment, and wages. The model implies that mothers face different reservation wages due to variance in preference over child care, while non-mothers face the same reservation wage. Thus, a mother with a relatively high wage may choose not to work because of her strong preference for time with children. In contrast, a childless woman who is not working must face a relatively low wage. For this reason, empirical analysis that focuses only on employed women may result in a biased estimate of the motherhood wage penalty. Second, to test the predictions of the model, I use 2004-2009 data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97) and include non-working women in the two-stage Heckman selection model. The empirical results from OLS and the fixed effects model are consistent with the findings in previous studies. However, the child penalty becomes smaller and insignificant after non-working women are included. It implies that the observed wage gap in the labor market appears to overstate the child wage penalty due to the sample selection bias.