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on Demographic Economics |
| By: | Henrik Kleven; Camille Landais; Johanna Posch; Andreas Steinhauer; Josef Zweimüller |
| Abstract: | Do family policies reduce gender inequality in the labor market? We contribute to this debate by investigating the joint impact of parental leave and child care, using administrative data covering the labor market and birth histories of Austrian workers over more than half a century. We start by quasi-experimentally identifying the causal effects of all family policy reforms since the 1950s on the full dynamics of male and female earnings. We then map these causal estimates into a decomposition framework a la Kleven, Landais and Søgaard (2019) to compute counterfactual gender gaps. Our results show that the enormous expansions of parental leave and child care subsidies have had virtually no impact on gender convergence. |
| JEL: | H31 H42 J08 J13 J16 J18 J22 |
| Date: | 2020–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:28082&r=all |
| By: | Abhijit Banerjee; Esther Duflo; Garima Sharma |
| Abstract: | This paper studies the long-run effects of a “big-push” program providing a large asset transfer to the poorest Indian households. In a randomized controlled trial that follows these households over 10 years, we find positive effects on consumption (1 SD), food security (0.1 SD), income (0.3 SD), and health (0.2 SD). These effects grow for the first seven years following the transfer and persist until year 10, consistent with the alleviation of a poverty trap. One main channel for persistence is that treated households take better advantage of opportunities to diversify into lucrative wage employment, especially through migration. |
| JEL: | I32 I38 O12 O15 O22 |
| Date: | 2020–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:28074&r=all |
| By: | Cinzia Di Novi (University of Pavia); Harshita Thakare (University of Pavia) |
| Abstract: | Though there has been a significant reduction in the number of under-five deaths globally over the years, it is still a major public health problem in developing countries. Under-five mortality is known to be the result of a wide variety of inputs, among which the availability of maternal and child health services. However, their coverage and distribution, in low- and middle-income countries, continue to remain inadequate and characterized by significant inequalities. The main aim of this study is to investigate the causes of inequality in accessing the basic maternal and newborn healthcare services in Bangladesh. To this end, we use nationally representative cross-sectional data from the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS), 2014. Our study builds on the Human Opportunity Index (HOI), developed at the World Bank (2006), which measures the total contribution of individual socioeconomic and demographic circumstances to inequality of opportunity in accessing basic services. We use the Shapley decomposition method to further analyze the marginal contributions of circumstances to the inequality. Our findings reveal that a mother’s education, wealth index and place of residence, are closely associated with access to basic maternal and newborn healthcare services. |
| Keywords: | Inequality, healthcare access, opportunities, circumstances, Human Opportunity Index. |
| JEL: | I14 J13 |
| Date: | 2020–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pav:demwpp:demwp0196&r=all |
| By: | Anthony EDO (CEPII.); Jacques MELITZ (CREST, CEPII and Heriot-Watt University.) |
| Abstract: | The scale of the rise in personal wealth following the Black Death calls the life-cycle hypothesis of consumption into consideration. This paper shows for the first time that the wealth effect of the Black Death on the price level continued in England for generations, up to 1450. Indeed, in absence of consideration of the wealth effect, other influences on the price level do not even appear in the econometric analysis. The separate roles of coinage, population, trade, wages and annual number of days worked for wages all also receive attention and new results follow for adjustment in the labor market. |
| Keywords: | Black Death, fourteenth-century England, price level, Great Famine. |
| JEL: | N13 J11 F33 J46 |
| Date: | 2020–12–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crs:wpaper:2020-30&r=all |
| By: | Hanming Fang; Chunmian Ge; Hanwei Huang; Hongbin Li |
| Abstract: | This paper studies how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected labor demand using over 100 million posted jobs on one of the largest online platforms in China. Our data reveals that, due to the effects of the pandemic both in China and abroad, the number of newly posted jobs within the first 13 weeks after the Wuhan lockdown on January 23, 2020 was about one third lower than that of the same lunar calendar weeks in 2018 and 2019. Using econometric methods, we show that, via the global supply chain, COVID-19 cases abroad and in particular pandemic-control policies by foreign governments reduced new job creations in China by 11.7%. We also find that Chinese firms most exposed to international trade outperformed other firms at the beginning of the pandemic but underperformed during recovery as the Novel Coronavirus spread throughout the world. |
| JEL: | F16 J2 |
| Date: | 2020–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:28072&r=all |
| By: | Dahlberg, Matz (Institute for Dialectology, Onomastics and Folklore Research); Egebark, Johan (Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN)); Vikman, Ullrika (Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy); Özcan, Gülay (Swedish Public Employment Service) |
| Abstract: | This paper evaluates an ambitious and newly designed program for increased integration in Sweden. The purpose of the program is to help newly arrived, low-educated refugees into employment. The program includes four main components: (1) intensive initial language training, (2) work practice under close supervision, (3) job search assistance, and (4) extended cooperation between the local public sector and firms. An important feature of the program is that the demand side of the labor market, represented by the largest real estate company in Gothenburg, is involved in designing the program. Our evaluation is based on a randomized controlled trial, where potential participants in one of the first waves were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. The paper presents results from the first two years after randomization. Using inference based on Fisher's exact test, we show that the program has positive effects on employment: around 30% of the individuals in the treatment group are employed each month during the first year following the end of the program, compared to an average of approximately 15% in the control group. |
| Keywords: | Refugee immigration; Integration; Randomized experiment; Labor market program |
| JEL: | C93 J08 J15 J23 J61 |
| Date: | 2020–12–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:1372&r=all |