|
on Demographic Economics |
| By: | Cai, Zhengyu; Winters, John V. |
| Abstract: | Fertility rates have fallen below replacement levels in many economies. We examine the relationship between female incomes and fertility for college graduates in the United States. Female income is likely endogenous to fertility, and candidate instrumental variables are likely imperfect. We use the Nevo and Rosen (2012) imperfect instrumental variable procedure to estimate two-sided bounds for the effect of female income on fertility. The effect of female income on fertility is unambiguously negative and non-trivial, but the magnitude is relatively small. Our results suggest that the recent fertility slowdown in the U.S. is not primarily due to higher female incomes. |
| Keywords: | fertility, children, motherhood, female income |
| JEL: | J13 J16 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:1516 |
| By: | Foltyn, Richard (Dept. of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration); Olsson, Jonna (Dept. of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration) |
| Abstract: | Using biennial data from the Health and Retirement Study, we estimate agedependent health dynamics and survival probabilities at annual frequency conditional on race, sex, self-reported health and other covariates. The estimates can be used to calculate heterogeneous life expectancies in the population. We show that the racial life expectancy gap remains large, even conditional on health, socioeconomic and marital status. Due to racial differences in health dynamics and mortality, married black men on average can expect to receive $6, 400 (or 8%) less in Social Security benefits in present value terms. Using a rich life cycle model, we estimate that this corresponds to a welfare loss of about 4%, whereas black married women’s welfare loss is primarily driven not by their own shorter life expectancy but the shorter life expectancy of their husbands. |
| Keywords: | Life expectancy; health dynamics; racial life expectancy gap; Social Security wealth; life cycle model |
| JEL: | C23 E21 I14 J14 |
| Date: | 2024–10–28 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:nhheco:2024_018 |
| By: | Morien El Haj; Stijn Baert; Luc Van Ootegem; Elsy Verhofstadt; Louis Lippens (-) |
| Abstract: | Disparities in labour market outcomes between parents and non-parents arise partly from discriminatory practices. Understanding these unfair practices is essential for fostering workplace equity. Our systematic review of the literature summarises employer discrimination based on various manifestations of parenthood in multiple labour market outcomes. Unlike previous studies, our review encompasses not only motherhood but also fatherhood and the stages preceding parenthood, namely fertility and pregnancy. In terms of labour market outcomes, we consider discrimination in hiring, remuneration, promotion, and dismissal. We also focus exclusively on experimental research, enabling causal conclusions about discrimination and its underlying mechanisms. Our synthesis suggests that employers consistently penalise women in the labour market when they have children, during pregnancy, and during their fertile years. In contrast, men often experience no adverse effects or even a premium when they have children. Researchers frequently find evidence of statistical discrimination as the primary explanation for their findings. Employers appear to rely predominantly on information based on norms and stereotypes to make decisions about parents in the labour market. We offer a roadmap for academics, policymakers, and employers to map and mitigate this phenomenon in the long term. In particular, we highlight fruitful directions for future research, including (i) more broadly assessing the effects of fertility, (ii) more effectively manipulating parenthood in experiments, (iii) more frequently investigating dismissal as a labour market outcome, and (iv) more profoundly examining the mechanisms of parenthood discrimination. |
| Keywords: | Parenthood, Pregnancy, Fertility, Discrimination, Labour market outcomes, Systematic review squares, efficiency, robustness |
| JEL: | J13 J16 J71 |
| Date: | 2024–11 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rug:rugwps:24/1098 |
| By: | Jonas Jessen; Lavinia Kinne; Michele Battisti |
| Abstract: | Child penalties in labour market outcomes are well-documented: after childbirth, mothers' employment and earnings drop persistently compared to fathers. Beyond gender norms, a potential driver could be the loss in labour market skills due to mothers' longer employment interruptions. This paper estimates child penalties in adult cognitive skills by adapting the pseudo-panel approach to a single cross-section of 29 countries in the PIAAC dataset. We find a persistent drop in numeracy skills after childbirth for both parents between 0.13 (short-run) and 0.16 standard deviations (long-run), but no statistically significant difference between mothers and fathers. Estimates of child penalties in skills strongly depend on controlling for pre-determined characteristics, especially education. Additionally, there is no evidence for worse occupational skill matches for mothers after childbirth. Our findings suggest that changes in general labour market skills cannot explain child penalties in labour market outcomes, and that a cross-sectional estimation of child penalties can be sensitive to characteristics of the outcome variable. |
| Keywords: | Child penalty, cognitive skills, gender inequality, PIAAC |
| JEL: | I20 J13 J16 J24 |
| Date: | 2024–11–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bdp:dpaper:0052 |
| By: | Hanno Foerster; Tim Obermeier; Bastian Schulz |
| Abstract: | We investigate how job displacement affects whom men marry and study implications for marriage market matching theory. Leveraging quasi-experimental variation from Danish establishment closures, we show that job displacement leads men to break up if matched with low-earning women and to re-match with higher earning women. We use a general search and matching model of the marriage market to derive several implications of our empirical findings: (i) husbands’ and wives’ incomes are substitutes rather than complements in the marriage market; (ii) our findings are hard to reconcile with one-dimensional matching, but are consistent with multidimensional matching; (iii) a substantial part of the cross-sectional correlation between spouses’ incomes arises spuriously from sorting on unobserved characteristics. We highlight the relevance of our results by simulating how the effect of rising individual-level inequality on between-household inequality is shaped by marital sorting. |
| Keywords: | marriage market, sorting, search and matching, multidimensional heterogeneity |
| JEL: | D10 J12 C78 D83 J31 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11387 |
| By: | Heaney, Tiarnán |
| Abstract: | A large literature argues that resource constraints inhibit human capital accumulation. We test this hypothesis using the introduction of the Old Age Pension in Ireland in 1908, evaluating its spillover on school enrolments within multigenerational households. Exploiting the OAP's age-based and means-test criteria, we identify the causal effect of the cash transfer on enrolments for children aged 14 to 16 using data from the 1901 and 1911 Censuses of Ireland. The OAP increased the school enrolments of the poorest children by 8 per cent, while no effect is detected for wealthier households. This suggests that when poverty constrains schooling, unconditional cash transfers amplify a household's demand for education by reducing the opportunity costs of schooling. |
| Keywords: | schooling, poverty, old age pension, cash transfer, human capital, economic history of Ireland |
| JEL: | D31 H55 I25 J18 J24 N33 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:qucehw:305271 |
| By: | Christopher S. Carpenter; Donn L. Feir; Krishna Pendakur; Casey Warman |
| Abstract: | The social and legal recognition of nonbinary people—those who do not exclusively identify with traditionally male or female genders—is growing. Yet, we know little about their economic realities. We offer the first nationally representative evidence on the earnings of nonbinary people using restricted-access 2021 Canadian Census data linked to tax records. We find that, although nonbinary individuals tend to be more educated than their peers, they have significantly lower earnings, especially at the bottom of the income distribution, even after adjusting for various demographic and socioeconomic factors. |
| JEL: | J0 |
| Date: | 2024–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33075 |
| By: | Kjell Arne Brekke; Snorre Kverndokk |
| Abstract: | We study how measures of socioeconomic health inequality inform about welfare inequality. We argue that transfers of either income or health from a better off to a worse off individual should reduce welfare inequality. Lacking an objective measure of individual welfare, we suggest that such a transfer should reduce at least one measure of inequality: inequality in income, health or socioeconomic health. This puts restrictions on measures of socioeconomic health inequality, where a correlation between income and health meets the requirement, while the concentration index only meets the requirement in a statistical sense. Finally, we show empirically that changes in the concentration index over time can be dominated by changes in income. Using data from HUNT, income changes account for 90% of the changes in the concentration index, while health and income are equally important with data from EU-SILC, with large variation across countries and years. |
| Keywords: | socioeconomic inequality, health inequality, health transfers, income transfers, concentration index |
| JEL: | D31 I12 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11318 |