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on Demographic Economics |
| By: | Ilhom Abdulloev (Open Societies Institute, Dushanbe); Ira N. Gang; Myeong-Su Yun |
| Abstract: | Women who want to work often face many more hurdles than men. This is true in Tajikistan where there is a large gender gap in labour force participation. We highlight the role of two factors – international migration and education – on the labour force participation decision and its gender gap. Using probit and decomposition analysis, our investigation shows that education and migration have a significant association with the gender gap in labour force participation in Tajikistan. International emigration from Tajikistan, in which approximately 93.5% of the participants are men, reduces labour force participation by men domestically; increased female education, especially at the university and vocational level, increases female participation. Both women acquiring greater access to education and men increasing their migration abroad contribute to reducing the gender gap. |
| Keywords: | migration, education, gender gap, labour force participation, Tajikistan |
| JEL: | J01 J16 O15 |
| Date: | 2014–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ost:wpaper:342&r=dem |
| By: | Bertrand, Marianne (Chicago Booth School of Business); Black, Sandra E. (The University of Texas at Austin); Jensen, Sissel (Dept. of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration); Lleras-Muney, Adriana (UCLA) |
| Abstract: | In late 2003, Norway passed a law mandating 40 percent representation of each gender on the board of publicly limited liability companies. The primary objective of this reform was to increase the representation of women in top positions in the corporate sector and decrease gender disparity in earnings within that sector. We document that the newly (post-reform) appointed female board members were observably more qualified than their female predecessors, and that the gender gap in earnings within boards fell substantially. While the reform may have improved the representation of female employees at the very top of the earnings distribution (top 5 highest earners) within firms that were mandated to increase female participation on their board, there is no evidence that these gains at the very top trickled-down. Moreover the reform had no obvious impact on highly qualified women whose qualifications mirror those of board members but who were not appointed to boards. We observe no statistically significant change in the gender wage gaps or in female representation in top positions, although standard errors are large enough that we cannot rule economically meaningful gains. Finally, there is little evidence that the reform affected the decisions of women more generally; it was not accompanied by any change in female enrollment in business education programs, or a convergence in earnings trajectories between recent male and female graduates of such programs. While young women preparing for a career in business report being aware of the reform and expect their earnings and promotion chances to benefit from it, the reform did not affect their fertility and marital plans. Overall, in the short run the reform had very little discernible impact on women in business beyond its direct effect on the newly appointed female board members. |
| Keywords: | Gender discrimination; board of directors. |
| JEL: | J01 J13 |
| Date: | 2014–08–29 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:nhheco:2014_028&r=dem |
| By: | Matt Dickson; Paul Gregg; Harriet Robinson |
| Abstract: | We study the intergenerational effects of parents' education on their children's educational outcomes. The endogeneity of parental education is addressed by exploiting the exogenous shift in education levels induced by the 1972 Raising of the School Leaving Age (RoSLA) from age 15 to 16 in England and Wales. Using data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children - a rich cohort dataset of children born in the early 1990s in Avon, England - allows us to examine the timing of impacts throughout the child's life, from pre-school assessments through the school years to the final exams at the end of the compulsory schooling period. We also determine whether there are differential effects for literacy and numeracy. We find that increasing parental education has a positive causal effect on children's outcomes that is evident at age 4 and continues to be visible up to and including the high stakes exams taken at age 16. Children of parents affected by the reform gain results just under 0.1 standard deviations higher than those whose parents were not impacted. The effect is focused on the lower educated parents where we would expect there to be more of an impact: children of these parents gaining results approximately 0.2 standard deviations higher. The effects appear to be broadly equal across numeracy and literacy test scores. |
| Keywords: | Intergenerational mobility, schooling, child development, ALSPAC |
| JEL: | I20 J62 J24 |
| Date: | 2014–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1295&r=dem |
| By: | Jesús M. Carro; Matilde P. Machado; Ricardo Mora |
| Abstract: | Recently, economists have established that culture—defined as a common set of preferences and beliefs —affects economic outcomes, including the levels of female labor force participation. Although this literature has argued that culture is transmitted from parents to children, it has also recognized the difficulty in empirically disentangling the parental transmission of preferences and/or beliefs from other confounding factors, such as technological change or investment in education. Using church registry data from the 18th and 19th centuries, our primary contribution is to interpret the effect of a mother’s labor participation status on that of her daughter as the mother-to-daughter transmission of preferences and/or beliefs that are isolated from confounding effects. Because our data are characterized by abundant non-ignorable missing information, we estimate the participation model and the missing process jointly by maximum likelihood. Our results reveal that the mother’s working status has a large and statistically significant positive effect on the daughter’s probability of working. These findings suggest that intergenerational family transmission of preferences and/or beliefs played a decisive role in the substantial increases in female labor force participation that occurred later. |
| Keywords: | Female labor market participation, Intergenerational transmission of preferences and/or beliefs, Historical family data, Church registry data, Non-ignorable missingness, Econometric methods for missing data |
| JEL: | J22 J24 J16 J12 |
| Date: | 2014–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cte:werepe:we1421&r=dem |
| By: | Joanna Clifton-Sprigg (The University of Edinburgh) |
| Abstract: | Impacts of parental emigration on educational outcomes of children and, in turn, the children's influence on peers are theoretically ambiguous. Using novel data I collected on migration experiences and timing, family background and school performance of lower secondary pupils in Poland, I analyse empirically whether children with parents working abroad (PWA) influence school performance of their classmates. Migration is mostly temporary in nature, with one parent engaging in employment abroad. As many as 63% of migrant parents have vocational qualifications, 29% graduated from high school, 4% have no qualifications and the remaining 4% graduated from university. Almost 18% of all children are affected by parental migration and, on average, 6.5% of pupils in a class have a parent abroad. Perhaps surprisingly, estimates suggest that pupils benefit from the presence of PWA classmates. PWA pupils whose parents graduated from high school exert the biggest positive impact on their classroom peers. Further, classmates are differently affected by PWA children; those who themselves experienced migration within the family benefit most. This positive effect is likely driven by the student level interactions or increased teachers' commitment to classes with students from migrant families. |
| Keywords: | education of adolescents, migration, peer effects |
| JEL: | F22 I29 J13 O15 |
| Date: | 2014–10–28 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:edn:esedps:252&r=dem |
| By: | Ferre, Celine; Sharif, Iffath |
| Abstract: | There is an increasing recognition that investment in human development at an earlier age can have a significant impact on the lifetime earnings capacity of an individual. This notion is the basis for the popularity of conditional cash transfer programs to help boost child health and education outcomes. The evidence on the impact of conditional cash transfers on health and education outcomes, however, is mixed. This paper uses panel data from a pilot project and evaluates the impact of conditional cash transfers on consumption, education, and nutrition outcomes among poor rural families in Bangladesh. Given implementation challenges the intervention was not able to improve school attendance. However the analysis shows that the pilot had a significant impact on the incidence of wasting among children who were 10-22 months old when the program started, reducing the share of children with weight-for-height below two standard deviations from the World Health Organization benchmark by 40 percent. The pilot was also able to improve nutrition knowledge: there was a significant increase in the proportion of beneficiary mothers who knew about the importance of exclusively breastfeeding infants until the age of six months. The results also suggest a significant positive impact on food consumption, especially consumption of food with high protein content. |
| Keywords: | Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Housing&Human Habitats,Rural Poverty Reduction,Primary Education |
| Date: | 2014–10–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:7077&r=dem |
| By: | Clémence Berson (Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne) |
| Abstract: | The integration of immigrants and their children is a burning issue in France. Governments build a large part of their assimilation policies on the labor market. The public sector is reputed to better assimilate minorities because of its entrance exams and pay-scales. In this paper, a comparison of the public and private sectors shows that second-generation immigrants are not treated equally. However, the wage gap is determined by the number and gender of immigrant parents and not by the country of origin. |
| Keywords: | Discrimination, wage gap, public-private sectors, France. |
| JEL: | C35 J31 J45 J71 |
| Date: | 2009–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mse:cesdoc:09059r&r=dem |
| By: | Ager, Philipp; Brückner, Markus; Herz, Benedikt |
| Abstract: | In the beginning of the 1890s, counties located in the Cotton Belt of the American South were hit by an agricultural plague, the boll weevil, that adversely affected cotton production and hence the demand for labor. We use variation in the incidence of the boll weevil multiplied with counties’ initial cotton share to construct instrumental variables estimates of the labor supply curve. Controlling for county and state-by-time fixed effects, we find a significant positive response of labor supply to changes in labor income. The effect is particularly large for females, consistent with evidence that females had a comparative advantage in picking cotton. |
| Keywords: | Labor Supply, Female Labor Force Participation, Agricultural Productivity Shocks, US South, Boll Weevil |
| JEL: | E24 J16 J21 N3 N31 |
| Date: | 2014–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:59410&r=dem |
| By: | Pritchett, Lant (Harvard University); Viarengo, Martina (Graduate Institute, Geneva and Center for International Development, Harvard University) |
| Abstract: | Understanding the institutional features that can improve learning outcomes and reduce inequality is a top priority for international and development organizations around the world. Economists appear to have a good case for support to non-governmental alternatives as suppliers of schooling. However, unlike other policy domains, freer international trade or privatization, economists have been remarkably unsuccessful in promoting the adoption of this idea. We develop a simple general positive model of why governments typically produce schooling which introduces the key notion of the lack of verifiability of socialization and instruction of beliefs, which makes third party contracting for socialization problematic. We use the model to explain variations around the world in levels of private schooling. We also predict the circumstances in which efforts to promote the different alternatives to government production--like charter, voucher, and scholarship--are likely to be successful. |
| Date: | 2013–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ecl:harjfk:rwp13-050&r=dem |
| By: | Risse, Mathias (Harvard University) |
| Abstract: | The author's 2012 book On Global Justice argues that the standpoint of humanity's collective ownership of the earth should be central to reflection on the permissibility of immigration. This standpoint is defended here. A number of political philosophers (Michael Blake, Christopher Wellman, David Miller and others) have recently offered accounts of immigration that tried to do without the kind of global standpoint provided by humanity's collective ownership of the earth. All these attempts fail, and fail because they do not integrate a global standpoint. It has been objected to the author's account that any given generation should be regarded as inheriting both the natural and the societal wealth of humanity. This standpoint is refuted here. We will also engage with Avery Kolers' intriguing approach to territory in terms of ethnogeographic communities. |
| Date: | 2014–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ecl:harjfk:rwp14-009&r=dem |