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on Demographic Economics |
| By: | F. Barigozzi; H. Cremer; K. Roeder |
| Abstract: | Our model explains the observed gender-specific patterns of career and child care choices through endogenous social norms. We study how these norms interact with the gender wage gap. We show that via the social norm a couple’s child care and career choices impose an externality on other couples, so that the laissez-faire is inefficient. We use our model to study the design and effectiveness of three commonly used policies. We find that child care subsidies and women quotas can be effective tools to mitigate or eliminate the externality. Parental leave, however, may even intensify the externality and decrease welfare. |
| JEL: | D13 H23 J16 J22 |
| Date: | 2017–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bol:bodewp:wp1094&r=dem |
| By: | Fontana, Nicola; Nannicini, Tommaso; Tabellini, Guido |
| Abstract: | The Italian civil war and the Nazi occupation of Italy occurred at a critical juncture, just before the birth of a new democracy and when, for the first time in a generation, Italians were choosing political affiliations and forming political identities. In this paper we study how these traumatic events shaped the new political system. We exploit geographic heterogeneity in the intensity and duration of the civil war, and the persistence of the battlefront along the "Gothic line" cutting through Northern-Central Italy. We find that the Communist Party gained votes in the post-war elections where the Nazi occupation and the civil war lasted longer, mainly at the expense of the centrist and catholic parties. This effect persists until the early 1990s. Evidence also suggests that this is due to an effect on political attitudes. Thus, the foreign occupation and the civil war left a lasting legacy of political extremism and polarization on the newborn Italian democracy. |
| Keywords: | Civil War; political extremism; World War II |
| Date: | 2017–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:11758&r=dem |
| By: | Helmut Dietl (Department of Business Administration, University of Zurich); Carlos Gomez-Gonzalez (Facultad Derecho y CC. Soziales, University of Castilla-La Mancha); Cornel Nesseler (Department of Business Administration, University of Zurich) |
| Abstract: | We empirically compare the performance of female and male team managers. We find that female team managers never perform worse than male team managers and that females work under significantly worse conditions than males. Additionally, we find that specialized experience has no influence. Special- 1 ized experience means having worked previously as an employee in the same industry. Our dataset consists of female and male managers in women soccer leagues acroos countries, viz., France, Germany, and Norway. Managers in team sports usually have exactly the same tasks (selection, coordination, and motivation of team members) as team managers in other industries. The limited number of women in top management positions in some of these industries and the lack of available data do not often allow comparisons. Our study, which includes a fair number of female team managers and a clear measurement of performance, can help understanding stereotypical behaviors. Therefore, our results have important implications for industries, companies, and clubs who oppose employing female team managers. |
| Keywords: | Performance, Female managers, discrimination, Working conditions |
| JEL: | J16 J7 L83 |
| Date: | 2017–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zrh:wpaper:364&r=dem |
| By: | Juan Francisco Jimeno (Banco de España); Aitor Lacuesta (Banco de España); Marta Martínez-Matute (Banco de España); Ernesto Villanueva (Banco de España) |
| Abstract: | We study how formal education and experience in the labour market correlate with measures of human capital available in thirteen countries participating in the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competences (PIAAC), an international study assessing adults’ proficiency in numeracy and literacy. Two findings are consistent with the notion that, in producing human capital, work experience is a substitute for formal education for respondents with compulsory schooling. Firstly, the number of years of working experience correlates with performance in PIAAC mostly among low-educated individuals. Secondly, individual fixed-effect models suggest that workers in jobs intensive in numerical tasks – relative to reading tasks – perform relatively better in the numeracy section of the PIAAC test than in the reading part. The results are driven by young individuals with low levels of schooling and hold mainly for simple tasks, suggesting that our findings are not fully generated by the sorting of workers across jobs. A back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests that the contribution of on-the-job learning to skill formation is a quarter of that of compulsory schooling in the countries we analyse. |
| Keywords: | human capital, tasks, education, working experience, cognitive skills |
| JEL: | J24 J31 I20 |
| Date: | 2016–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bde:wpaper:1635&r=dem |
| By: | Chichun Fang (University of Michigan); Charles Brown (University of Michigan); David Weir (University of Michigan) |
| Abstract: | We utilize three sets of data resources—the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), linked Social Security earnings records of the HRS respondents, and publicly available pension plan descriptions—to study pension wealth accumulations among the recent HRS cohorts. We document the trends in pension wealth over time and across cohorts during a period in which the economic consequences of the Great Recession were significant. However, given that pension wealth of many respondents were imputed in earlier waves due to the lack of information about pension plan provisions, there is the question of how much of the changes in pension wealth should be attributed to errors in imputation. The recently available pension plan descriptions from private employers’ Form 5500 filings and public employers’ websites, which improve the respondent-plan linkage over what was available in previous waves, allow us to examine this exact question. In particular, we show that the newly available sets of information not only reduce the need for imputation, but also enable us to identify the plans not reported by HRS respondents in the survey and the retirement wealth associated with these plans. Finally, we also test the validity of the earnings projection methods used to produce Social Security and pension wealth estimates in the HRS, and we end our report with a discussion over the pros and cons among the projection methods. |
| Date: | 2016–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mrr:papers:wp350&r=dem |
| By: | Iris Grant; Iris Kesternich; Carina Steckenleiter; Joachim Winter |
| Abstract: | We analyze the long-term effects of gender imbalances on female labor force participation, in particular in the politician market, exploiting variation in sex ratios across Germany induced by WWII. In the 1990 elections, women were more likely to run for office in constituencies that had relatively fewer men in 1946. |
| Date: | 2017 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ete:ceswps:565080&r=dem |
| By: | Alvaredo, Facundo; Atkinson, Anthony B; Morelli, Salvatore |
| Abstract: | Recent research highlighted controversy about the evolution of concentration of personal wealth. In this paper we provide new evidence about the long-run evolution of top wealth shares for the United Kingdom. The new series covers a long period - from 1895 to the present - and has a different point of departure from the previous literature: the distribution of estates left at death. We find that the application to the estate data of mortality multipliers to yield estimates of wealth among the living does not substantially change the degree of concentration over much of the period both, in the UK and US, allowing inferences to be made for years when this method cannot be applied. The results show that wealth concentration in the UK remained relatively constant during the first wave of globalization, but then decreased dramatically in the period from 1914 to 1979. The UK went from being more unequal in terms of wealth than the US to being less unequal. However, the decline in UK wealth concentration came to an end around 1980, and since then there is evidence of an increase in top shares, notably in the distribution of wealth excluding housing in recent years. We investigate the triangulating evidence provided by data on capital income concentration and on reported super fortunes. |
| Keywords: | estates; mortality multipliers; United Kingdom; United States; Wealth Inequality |
| JEL: | D3 H2 N3 |
| Date: | 2017–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:11759&r=dem |