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on Unemployment, Inequality and Poverty |
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Issue of 2021‒05‒24
ten papers chosen by |
| By: | Hamermesh, Daniel S. (Barnard College); Myck, Michal (Centre for Economic Analysis, CenEA); Oczkowska, Monika (Centre for Economic Analysis, CenEA) |
| Abstract: | By age 77 a plurality of women in wealthy Western societies are widows. Comparing older (aged 70+) married women to widows in the American Time Use Survey 2003-18 and linking the data to the Current Population Survey allow inferring the short- and longer-term effects of an arguably exogenous shock—husband’s death—and measuring the paths of adjustment of time use to it. Widows differ from otherwise similar married women, especially from married women with working husbands, by cutting back on home production, mainly food preparation and housework, mostly by engaging in less of it each day, not doing it less frequently. French, Italian, German, and Dutch widows behave similarly. Widows are alone for 2/3 of the time they had spent with their spouses, with a small increase in time with friends and relatives shortly after becoming widowed. Evidence from the European countries shows that widows feel less time stress than married women but are also less satisfied with their lives. Following older women in 18 European countries before and after a partner’s death shows that widowhood reduces their feelings of time pressure. U.S. longitudinal data demonstrate that it increases feelings of depression. Most of the adjustment of time use in response to widowhood occurs within one year of the husband’s death; but feelings of reduced time pressure and of depression persist much longer. |
| Keywords: | time use, marital status, time stress, life satisfaction, depression |
| JEL: | J22 J14 I31 |
| Date: | 2021–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp14343&r= |
| By: | Chu, Shuai; Zeng, Xiangquan; Zimmermann, Klaus F |
| Abstract: | Non-cognitive abilities are supposed to affect student's educational performance, who are challenged by parental expectations and norms. Parental gender stereotypes are shown to strongly decrease student wellbeing in China. Students are strongly more depressed, feeling blue, unhappy, not enjoying life and sad with no male-female differences while parental education does not matter. |
| Keywords: | gender identity; gender stereotypes; mental health; non-cognitive abilities; student wellbeing; subjective wellbeing |
| JEL: | I12 I26 I31 J16 |
| Date: | 2020–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:15497&r= |
| By: | Attanasio, Orazio; De Paula, Áureo; Toppeta, Alessandro |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates the evolution of socio-emotional skills over the life cycle and across generations. We start by characterising the evolution of these skills in the first part of the life cycle. We then examine whether parents' socio-emotional skills in early childhood rather than in adolescence are more predictive of their children's socio-emotional skills. We exploit data from the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) and focus on two dimensions of socioemotional skills: internalizing and externalizing skills, linked respectively to the ability of focusing attention and engaging in interpersonal activities. When looking at the evolution of socio-emotional skills over the life cycle, we notice a considerable amount of persistence which leads to a rejection of the simple Markov dynamic models often used in the literature. The BCS70 contains data on the skills of three generations. Moreover, the skills for cohort members and their children are not observed at the same calendar time, but at similar ages. We establish that parents' and children's socio-emotional skills during early childhood are comparable and estimate intergenerational mobility in socio-emotional skills, examining the link between the parent's socio-emotional skills at age 5, 10 and 16 and the child's socio-emotional skills between ages 3 and 16. We show that the magnitudes of intergenerational persistence estimates are smaller than the magnitude of intergenerational persistence estimates in occupation and income found for the United Kingdom. Finally, we estimate multi-generational persistence in socio-emotional skills and find that the grandmother's internalizing skill correlates with the grandchild's socio-emotional skills even after controlling for parental skills. |
| Keywords: | inequality; intergenerational mobility; Socio-Emotional Skills; Spectral gap mobility index |
| JEL: | D63 I21 J24 J62 |
| Date: | 2020–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:15254&r= |
| By: | Stefani Milovanska-Farrington; Stephen Farrington |
| Abstract: | Happiness is strongly associated with goal attainment, productivity, mental health and suicidal risk. This paper examines the effect of satisfaction with areas of life on subjective well-being (SWB), the importance of relative perceptions compared to absolute measures in predicting overall life satisfaction, and differences in the domains of life which have the greatest impact on happiness of men and women. The findings suggest that relative perceptions have a large statistically significant effect on SWB. Satisfaction with family life and health have the largest while satisfaction with income has the lowest impact on overall SWB for both genders. Work satisfaction is more important for men than for women, whereas partner’s happiness is more valued by female respondents. Satisfaction with household compared to personal income has a larger effect on SWB in all subsamples except employed women. Understanding the perceived and factual determinants of happiness has urgent implications in the context of the detrimental impact of the Covid-19 outbreak on SWB. |
| Keywords: | subjective well-being, satisfaction with areas of life, perceptions, values, gender differences |
| JEL: | D60 I31 J16 D03 |
| Date: | 2021 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:diw:diwsop:diw_sp1128&r= |
| By: | Aizer, Anna; Devereux, Paul J.; Salvanes, Kjell G |
| Abstract: | Women who give birth as teens have worse subsequent educational and labor market outcomes than women who have first births at older ages. However, previous research has attributed much of these effects to selection rather than a causal effect of teen childbearing. Despite this, there are still reasons to believe that children of teen mothers may do worse as their mothers may be less mature, have fewer financial resources when the child is young, and may partner with fathers of lower quality. Using Norwegian register data, we compare outcomes of children of sisters who have first births at different ages. Our evidence suggests that the causal effect of being a child of a teen mother is much smaller than that implied by the cross-sectional differences but that there are probably still significant long-term, adverse consequences, especially for children born to the youngest teen mothers. Unlike previous research, we have information on fathers and find that negative selection of fathers of children born to teen mothers plays an important role in producing inferior child outcomes. These effects are particularly large for mothers from higher socio-economic groups. Our data also enable us to examine the effect of age at first birth across a range of maternal ages. Importantly, while we find that child outcomes are worst for those born to teen mothers, outcomes improve with mothers' age at first birth until mothers are in their mid-20s and then flatten out. |
| Keywords: | Child outcomes; Human Capital; Teen Childbearing |
| JEL: | I31 I32 J12 J13 |
| Date: | 2020–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:15353&r= |
| By: | Bozio, Antoine; Garbinti, Bertrand; Goupille-Lebret, Jonathan; Guillot, Malka; Piketty, Thomas |
| Abstract: | How much redistribution policies can account for long-run changes in inequality? To answer this question, we quantify the extent of redistribution over time by the percentage reduction from pretax to post-tax inequalities, and decompose the changes in post-tax inequalities into different redistributive policies and changes in pretax inequalities. To estimate these redistributive statistics, we construct homogenous annual series of post-tax national income for France over the 1900-2018 period, and compare them with those recently constructed for the U.S. We obtain three major findings. First, redistribution has increased in both countries over the period, earlier in the U.S., later in France, to reach similar levels today. Second, the substantial long-run decline in post-tax inequality in France over the 1900-2018 period is due mostly to the fall in pretax inequality (accounting for three quarters of the total decline), and to a lesser extent to the direct redistributive role of taxes, transfers and other public spending (about one quarter). Third, the reason why overall inequality is much smaller in France than in the U.S. is entirely due to differences in pretax inequality. These findings suggest that policy discussions on inequality should, in the future, pay more attention to policies affecting pretax inequality and should not focus exclusively on "redistribution". |
| Keywords: | inequality; Predistribution; redistribution; taxation |
| JEL: | E01 H2 H5 I3 |
| Date: | 2020–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:15415&r= |
| By: | Alesina, Alberto F; Tabellini, Marco |
| Abstract: | We review the growing literature on the political effects of immigration. After a brief summary of the economics of immigration, we turn to the main focus of the paper: how immigrants influence electoral outcomes in receiving countries, and why. We start from the "standard" view that immigration triggers political backlash and raises support for nativist, anti-immigrant political parties. We present evidence from a variety of studies that the causes of natives' political discontent are unlikely to have (solely) economic roots, but are instead more tightly linked to cultural and social concerns. Next, we discuss works that paint a more nuanced picture of the effects of immigration, which, in some cases, can move natives' preferences in a more liberal direction. We also consider the factors that can explain a seemingly puzzling empirical regularity: the anti-immigration rhetoric has become a banner of right wing parties. We conclude by outlining what, to us, are promising avenues for future research. |
| JEL: | D72 J11 J15 J61 Z1 |
| Date: | 2020–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:15486&r= |
| By: | Petri Bockerman (University of Jyvaskyla, Labour Institute for Economic Research, and IZA Institute of Labor Economics); Mika Haapanen (University of Jyvaskyla, School of Business and Economics); Christopher Jepsen (University College Dublin, School of Economics and Geary Institute, IZA Institute of Labor Economics, and CES-Ifo) |
| Abstract: | This paper studies the causal effect of parental death on children's mental health. Combining several nationwide register-based data for Finnish citizens born between 1971 and 1986, we use an event study methodology to analyze hospitalization for mental health-related reasons by the age of 30. We find that there is no clear evidence of increased hospitalization following the death of a parent of a different gender, but there are significant effects for boys losing their fathers and girls losing their mothers. Depression is the most common cause of hospitalization in the first three years following paternal death, whereas anxiety and, to a lesser extent, self-harm are the most common causes five to ten years after paternal death. We also provide descriptive evidence of an increase in the use of mental health-related medications and sickness absence, as well as substantial reductions in years of schooling, employment, and earnings in adulthood for the affected children. |
| Keywords: | parental death, mental health, hospitalization, depression, labor market |
| JEL: | I10 I12 |
| Date: | 2021–03–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ucd:wpaper:202107&r= |
| By: | Diaz, Lina (George Mason University); Houser, Daniel (George Mason University); Ifcher, John (Santa Clara University); Zarghamee, Homa (Barnard College) |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we use stated satisfaction to estimate social preferences: subjects report their satisfaction with payment-profiles that hold their own payment constant while varying another subject's payment. This approach yields significant support for the inequity aversion model of Fehr and Schmidt (1999). This model is among the most renowned in behavioral economics, positing a generalized aversion to inequality that is stronger when one's own payoff is lower–rather than higher–than others'; i.e., "envy" is stronger than "guilt." While aggregate-level estimates based on revealed preferences in laboratory games have supported the model, the assumption that guilt is stronger than envy is often violated at the individual level. This paradox may be due to limitations of the revealed-preference approach. An advantage of avoiding games is that eliciting stated satisfaction is relatively easy to implement and is less prone to being confounded with motives like reciprocity; also the absence of tradeoffs between own and others' payoffs is cognitively less demanding for subjects. Our unstructured approach does not limit the expression of social preferences to inequity aversion, yet our methodology yields significant support for it. At the individual level, 86% of subjects exhibit at least as strong envy as guilt, and 76% (65%) of subjects weakly (strongly) adhere to the model. Our individual-level estimates are robust to changing the value of one's own constant payment and to changing the range of the other subject's payments. Methodologically, eliciting satisfaction can be an easy-to-implement complement to choice-based preference-measures in contexts other than social preferences that are of interest to economists. |
| Keywords: | inequity aversion, social preferences, stated satisfaction, laboratory experiment |
| JEL: | C91 D31 D63 I31 |
| Date: | 2021–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp14347&r= |
| By: | Antonio Cabrales (Dept. of Economics, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid); Antonio M. Espín (Department of Social Anthropology, University of Granada and Loyola Behavioral Lab, Loyola Andalucía University); Praveen Kujal (Department of Economics, Middlesex University); Stephen Rassenti (Economic Science Institute, Chapman University) |
| Abstract: | Human decisions in the social domain are modulated by the interaction between intuitive and reflective processes. Requiring individuals to decide quickly or slowly triggers these processes and is thus likely to elicit different social behaviors. Meanwhile, time pressure has been associated with inefficiency in market settings and market regulation often requires individuals to delay their decisions via cooling-off periods. Yet, recent research suggests that people who make reflective decisions are met with distrust. If this extends to external time constraints, then forcing individuals to delay their decisions may be counterproductive in scenarios where trust considerations are important. In three Trust Game experiments (total n = 1,872), including within- and betweensubjects designs, we test whether individuals trust more someone who is forced to respond quickly (intuitively) or slowly (reflectively). We find that trustors do not adjust their behavior (or their beliefs) to the trustee’s time conditions. This seems to be an appropriate response because time constraints do not affect trustees’ behavior, at least when the game decisions are binary (trust vs. don’t trust; reciprocate vs. don’t reciprocate) and therefore mistakes cannot explain choices. Thus, delayed decisions per se do not seem to elicit distrust. |
| Keywords: | trust; trustworthiness; beliefs; reflection; dual process; intuition |
| JEL: | C90 C91 D91 |
| Date: | 2021 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:chu:wpaper:21-08&r= |