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on Labour Economics |
| By: | Caroline Chuard |
| Abstract: | Parental leave policies across the globe have become much more generous than they used to be. This is also true for prenatal maternal leave. While this may be costly in the short run, little is known about the effect of maternal employment during pregnancy on newborn health. In this paper, I exploit three sharp policy changes on the duration of paid parental leave in Austria that strongly affected the share of mothers who work up to the 32nd week of pregnancy. I use administrative data from Austria on the working history of women linked to the full Austrian birth register and coupled with a regression discontinuity framework to identify the effect of prenatal employment on their offspring. Maternal employment during pregnancy with the second child reacts strongly to these policy changes. The share of employed mothers sharply declined in 1990 by 19.1 percentage points, increased in 1996 by 7.2 percentage points and declined again by 6.4 percentage points in 2000. None of these changes in prenatal employment translated into effects on newborn health measured via birth weight, gestational length, and Apgar scores. This result holds true for mothers of different socioeconomic backgrounds and across industries. The effect is precisely estimated, which suggests that prenatal employment prior to the 32nd week of pregnancy does not causally affect the fetus for measures visible at birth. |
| Keywords: | Newborn health, maternal employment, pregnancy conditions, maternal leave |
| JEL: | I10 J13 J16 |
| Date: | 2018–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zur:econwp:301&r=lab |
| By: | Shoshana Grossbard (San Diego State University); Tansel Yilmazer (Ohio State University); Lingrui Zhang (University of Waterloo) |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates gender differentials in citations of articles published in two journals specialized in Demographic Economics, a field that has traditionally attracted relatively large numbers of women researchers. In contrast to findings based on citations of top economics journals, we find a gender gap in citations favoring women among articles published in the Journal of Population Economics (JPOP) or the Review of Economics of the Household (REHO) between 2003 and 2014 . If the corresponding author is male, having at least one female co-author boosts citations. Across subfields of demographic economics, citations of female authors increase as female representation in the subfield increases. The gender gap in citations favoring women is not found for authors with limited experience past graduate school, which supports an explanation for the gender gap based on authors’ prior experience with economics journals of higher rank. |
| Keywords: | citations, gender gap |
| JEL: | A14 I23 D10 J10 J16 |
| Date: | 2018–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hka:wpaper:2018-078&r=lab |
| By: | Purva Khera |
| Abstract: | Gender gaps in womens’ economic opportunities—labor market and entrepreneurship—have remained high in India. Lack of adequate collateral limits women entrepreneurs’ ability to access formal finance, leaving them to rely on informal sources, constraining their growth. A small-open economy DSGE model is built to investigate the long-run macroeconomic impacts from closing gender gaps in financial access. Results suggest that an increase in women entrepreneurs access to formal credit results in higher female entrepreneurship and employment, which boosts India’s output by 1.6 percent. However, regulations and gender-specific constraints in the labor market limit potential gains as females’ access to quality jobs in the formal sector remains restricted. The paper shows that the factors influencing the number of females are different from those influencing the share of females in formal economic activity. Combining gender-targeted financial inclusion policies with policies that lower constraints on formal sector employment could boost India’s output by 6.8 percent. |
| Date: | 2018–09–28 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfwpa:18/212&r=lab |
| By: | Kotschy, Rainer (LMU Munich); Sunde, Uwe (LMU Munich) |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the consequences of population aging and of changes in the education composition of the population for macroeconomic performance. Estimation results from a theoretically founded empirical framework show that aging as well as the education composition of the population influence economic performance. The estimates and simulations based on population projections and different counterfactual scenarios show that population aging will have a substantial negative consequence for macroeconomic performance in many countries in the years to come. The results also suggest that education expansions tend to offset the negative effects, but that the extent to which they compensate the aging effects differs vastly across countries. The simulations illustrate the heterogeneity in the effects of population aging on economic performance across countries, depending on their current age and education composition. The estimates provide a method to quantify the increase in education that is required to offset the negative consequences of population aging. Counterfactual changes in labor force participation and productivity required to neutralize aging are found to be substantial. |
| Keywords: | demographic change; demographic structure; distribution of skills; projections; education-aging-elasticity; |
| JEL: | J11 O47 |
| Date: | 2018–10–17 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rco:dpaper:121&r=lab |
| By: | Burks, Stephen V. (University of Minnesota, Morris); Monaco, Kristen (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics) |
| Abstract: | The US trucking industry trade press often portrays the US labor market for truck drivers as not working, citing persistent driver shortages and high levels of firm‐level turnover, and predicting significant resulting constraints on the supply of motor freight services. We investigate the truck driver labor market using three techniques. First, using data from the Occupational Employment Statistics of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we delineate the structure of the driver workforce. Second, from the same source we find that the trucking labor market has displayed some characteristics of a "tight" labor market since 2003: rising nominal wages, stable/growing employment, and lower rates of unemployment than other blue-collar jobs. Third, using data from the Current Population Survey we describe the occupations and industries from which drivers come and to which drivers go, when they change occupations, and statistically analyze these entries and exits. We find relatively high rates of occupational attachment among drivers, and importantly, we also find that truck drivers respond in the expected manner to differences in earnings across occupations. Finally, we point out that the issues discussed by the industry are concentrated in one segment of the overall market, that for drivers in long distance truckload (TL) motor freight, which contains between one sixth and one fourth of all heavy and tractor‐trailer truck drivers. These findings suggest a more nuanced view of this labor market. The market as a whole appears to work as well as any other blue‐collar labor market, and while the truck driver market tends to be "tight," there do not appear to be any special constraints preventing entry into (or exit from) the occupation. There is thus no reason to think that driver supply should fail to respond to price signals in the standard way, given sufficient time. The persistent issues localized in the TL segment are not visible in the aggregate data, and require a distinct analysis. |
| Keywords: | occupational mobility, industrial mobility, trucking, truckload, motor freight, turnover, truck driver, driver shortage, secondary labor market segment |
| JEL: | J62 J49 R49 J24 |
| Date: | 2018–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp11813&r=lab |
| By: | Martin, Chris (University of Bath); Wang, Bingsong (University of Warwick) |
| Abstract: | Recent evidence that the opportunity cost of employment is pro cyclical implies that existing models based around search frictions in the labour market cannot match the large volatilities of unemployment and vacancies observed in the data. In this paper, we incorporate insights from behavioural economics into the search frictions framework. The resultant model can match observed volatilities even if the opportunity cost is strongly pro cyclical. The key mechanism in the model is that the pro-cyclicality of the opportunity cost has a limited impact on the reference wage of workers ; this feeds through into a limited volatility of the wage and so to a large unemployment volatility |
| Keywords: | behavioural economics ; search frictions ; unemployment volatilty |
| JEL: | E23 E32 J23 J30 J64 |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wrk:warwec:1179&r=lab |
| By: | Foster, Gigi; Stratton, Leslie S. |
| Abstract: | Using Bertrand, Kamenica and Pan’s (2015) original data, we find that female breadwinning is significantly associated with partnership problems only for older women in cross sections, but for younger ones in fixed-effects specifications. In more recent US and Australian data, female breadwinning is associated with a modestly higher dissolution risk and a fall in some measures of reported relationship quality, but mainly for young people in cohabiting partnerships and men in less educated partnerships. We suggest our results reflect changing norms plus market dynamics arising from the ease of access to superior partnership alternatives for women who out-earn their partners. |
| Keywords: | Social Norms,Gender,Separation and Divorce,Cohabitation,Satisfaction |
| JEL: | J12 J16 I31 Z13 |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:259&r=lab |