How the other half lived: Marriage and emancipation in the age of the Pill

The contraceptive Pill was FDA approved in 1960. However, it would be another decade before young unmarried women had full access. In the meantime, marriage constituted a way to the Pill. The later 1960s/early 1970s also saw a convergence on 18 as the minimum age of marriage, many states lowering it from 21. Exploiting these law changes, we find that a lowered minimum age precipitated marriage, delayed marital fertility, and improved women׳s educational and occupational outcomes. Marriage easing credit constraints combined with the contraceptive properties of the Pill form the hypothesized pathway.     

Accounting for age in marital search decisions

Spouse quality, measured by educational attainment, varies significantly with the age at which an individual marries, peaking in the mid-twenties then declining through the early-forties. Interestingly, this decline is much sharper for women than men, meaning women increasingly marry less educated men as they age. Moreover, quality has worsened for educated women over several decades, while it has improved for men. Using a non-stationary sequential search model, we identify and quantify the search frictions that generate these age-dependent marriage outcomes. We find that single-life utility is typically the dominant friction, though college women in the 1950 and 1970 cohorts are affected even more by deteriorating suitor quality. Regardless of educational status, individual choice (as opposed to pure luck) is pivotal in explaining marriage market outcomes earlier in life.     

Fertility and maternal labor supply: Evidence from the new two-child policies in urban China

The One-Child Policy which had been implemented for over 30 years in China was formally relaxed in 2010s. The New Two-Child Policies gradually allowed all couples to have two children. This paper investigates the impact of the New Two-Child Policies on individual behavior related to birth and maternal labor supply. We find number of children significantly increased after the implementation of the New Two-Child Policies. Using the New Two-Child Policies as an exogenous variation in fertility, we find negative effect of number of children on maternal labor supply in both extensive and intensive margin. Our results have important implications for the further relaxation of birth-control policies.     

Women's education and marriage decisions: Evidence from China

The faster increase in education among women compared with men has been underexplored. Thus, using Chinese data, we evaluate the impacts of a plausibly exogenous increase in educational attainment on women's marriage decisions. An extra year of education does not change women's decision to marry and leads to a brief delay of 0.12 years in their marriage age on average, which is much smaller than the delay among men. Although more educated women and men both have improved labour market outcomes, which may have increased their patience, men experience larger income growth than women do. Moreover, declining physical attractiveness at least partly explains why the delay is less than 1 year. Overall, the results are more reliable after addressing the endogeneity issue.     

城市两性初婚年龄模式分析——基于中国综合社会调查2005年度数据

国人婚配年龄的变迁,一直缺乏长期性数据;婚配市场的实际情况,也缺乏实证性的长期数据。利用CGSS2005数据,对五代人(20世纪20年代—20世纪70年代)的平均初婚年龄的变化、趋势加以研究,对男性和女性初婚年龄、早婚、不婚、晚婚、集中成婚等进行了横向和纵向的比较,揭示了各自独立和彼此承接的关系和特点。     

ON THE EMERGENCE OF TOYBOYS: THE TIMING OF MARRIAGE WITH AGING AND UNCERTAIN CAREERS*

We explore how gender bias in career opportunities affects matching in a marriage market with search frictions and where an individual’s fitness decays with age. We document a “being left on the shelf” effect where young singles, who find the marriage market rapidly thins with age, rush into early partnership. Singles with stronger career opportunities, however, have a greater option value to defer marriage. More equal career opportunities for women (captured by greater schooling and better occupations) potentially explain the recent emergence of toyboy unions, in which the woman is at least 5 years older than her partner.     

The Effect of Education on the Timing of Marriage and First Birth in Pakistan

A rapid rise in women’s education levels, an increase in the age at marriage and an increase in the age at which they have their first child are key features of demographic transition in any country. Education is considered to be an essential component in this process because increases in educational attainment are likely to significantly affect both age at marriage and the duration between marriage and first birth - in particular increasing both the age at marriage and the time to first child. This paper uses individual level unit record data from Pakistan to examine the effect of education on the age at marriage and on the duration between marriage and first birth. We jointly estimate educational attainment, age at marriage and duration between marriage and first birth allowing for household level unobserved heterogeneity. We find that educational attainment increases the age at marriage but does not have a statistically significant effect on the duration between marriage and first birth. However, there is a threshold level of education that must be attained before educational attainment starts having an effect on the hazard of marriage.

     

PLAYING THE FERTILITY GAME AT WORK: AN EQUILIBRIUM MODEL OF PEER EFFECTS

We study workplace peer effects in fertility decisions using a game theory model of strategic interactions among coworkers that allows for multiple equilibria. Using register‐based data on fertile‐aged women working in medium‐sized establishments in Denmark, we uncover negative average peer effects. Allowing for heterogeneous effects by worker type, we find that positive effects dominate across worker types defined by age or education. Negative effects dominate within age groups and among low‐education types. Policy simulations show that these estimated effects make the distribution of where women work an important consideration, beyond simply if they work, in predicting population fertility.     

An empirical analysis of assortative mating in India and the U.S.

This paper uses a conditional logit model to analyze empirically how individuals sort themselves through marriage into households in India and the U.S. The results support positive assortative mating of spouses with respect to age and schooling. We find no evidence in favor of Becker's theory of labor market specialization in couples. Moreover, while similarity in age is the strongest predictor of marital choice in India, education of a prospective spouse plays a more important role in the U.S. Finally, we find that while dowry increases the likelihood of women marrying men with characteristics dissimilar to their own, availability of a mate has a positive effect on the degree of stratification in India.     

Age at marriage,social norms,and female education in Nepal

We study the impact of age at marriage on female education. We hypothesize that in cultures where women marry young, parents discount the pecuniary benefits of educating girls; the earlier the anticipated age at marriage the greater this discount. We empirically test this effect using household data from Nepal. We control for potential endogeneity of age at marriage by exploiting variations in cultural norms regarding dowry and differences in the average age of female marriage among ethnicities and regions as instrumental variables. The econometric results support the hypothesis that female education is negatively affected by cultural norms that favor early marriage.     

For better or for worse: the long-term effects of postwar mobilization on family formation

This article estimates the long-term legacies of female labour force mobilization on women’s family formation outcomes such as marriage, age at first marriage and divorce. We identify the long-term marriage effects of female labour force mobilization by exploring postwar mandatory employment in Germany. Using difference-in-differences analysis, we find that participation in postwar reconstruction efforts increased women’s probability of being currently married, ever married and marrying at younger ages. We also find that postwar employment had no differential effect on divorce rates of the affected cohorts of women. These results persist after accounting for the potential changes in the composition of the population, demand for female labour, war relief payments and postwar state-specific policies.     

Sex Differentials in Earnings in the South Korean Labor Market

We examine gender differences in earnings among South Korean workers in 1988 – the year the South Korean National Assembly enacted the Equal Employment Opportunity Act. Using the "88 Occupational Wage Bargaining Survey on the Actual Condition," we calculate women's mean earnings as a percentage of men's mean earnings by major industrial category and educational attainment. We find a larger wage gap among clerical and sales workers than production workers or professionals. Generally, the more education a woman has, the smaller the gap between her earnings and those of her male counterparts. Women with a middle-school education have a mean income 53.5 percent that of comparable men, while the female-to-male wage ratio among college graduates is 76.1 percent. We analyze wage differences separately for women and men. Following Ronald Oaxaca's (1973) work, we decompose male–female wage differentials. We also calculate a discrimination coefficient. Our work shows that, all else equal, men earn from 33.6 percent to 46.9 percent more than women with comparable skills. We attribute the difference to gender discrimination.     

College Quality and Wages in the United States

Abstract. We estimate the effects of the quality of the college a student attends on their later earnings using data from a cohort of US college students from the late 1970s and early 1980s. We rely on a linear selection on observables identification strategy, which is justified in our context by a very rich set of conditioning variables. We find economically important earnings effects of college quality for men and women, as well as effects on educational attainment, spousal earnings and other demographic variables. These effects remain roughly constant over time and result primarily from effects on wages, rather than from effects on hours or labor force participation. We find that, over the lower part of the range of college quality, increases in college quality (which entail higher expenditures per student) pass a simple social cost–benefit test.     

The Effect of Marriage on Education of Immigrants: Evidence from a Policy Reform Restricting Marriage Migration*

We investigate the effect of immigrants’ marriage behavior on dropout from education. To identify the causal effect, we exploit a recent Danish policy reform that generated exogenous variation in marriage behavior by a complete abolishment of marriage migration for immigrants below 24 years. The reform influenced immigrants from countries with a high historical rate of marriage migration more than immigrants from country groups with a low rate. We find that the dropout rate for males increases by 25 percentage points as a consequence of marriage to a marriage migrant, whereas the effect for females is small and mostly insignificant.     

Returns to women’s education using optimal IV selection

This paper investigates returns to women’s education by applying an optimal IV selection approach, post-Lasso IV estimation, which improves the first-stage predictive relationship between an endogenous regressor and instruments. Using the 2010 American Community Survey, we find that an extra year of education increases married women’s own income by $4,480 and spouse income by $8,822. Our findings indicate that 53% of the increase in women’s consumption by education is attributed to the marriage market, and thus, we conclude that the marriage market is the primary channel through which education improves women’s well-being. The results demonstrate the advantages of the post-Lasso approach: The resulting two-stage least squares estimator maintains efficiency without increasing finite sample bias and is less subject to the inconsistency problem when some instruments are invalid; This differs from the results using the instrument of birth quarters only, which is mostly applied in studies on returns to education.     

Continuing Progress? Trends in Occupational Segregation in the United States over the 1970s and 1980s

This study uses comparable data on 470 detailed occupations from the 1970, 1980, and 1990 Censuses to analyze trends in occupational segregation in the United States in the 1980s and compare them in detail to the 1970s experience of declining segregation. We find that the trend towards reduced segregation did indeed continue into the 1980s at only a slightly slower pace. In both decades, changes in sex composition within occupations accounted for the major share of the decline in segregation (compared to changes in the mix of occupations in the economy). We also find that the pattern of changes in the sex composition of occupations and in the employment distribution of workers that produced the observed reductions in segregation were remarkably similar in each of these two periods. This similarity potentially poses some problems for the future. As women continue to enter the same areas, resegregation, which we found to have relatively moderate effects in the 1970s and 1980s, becomes an increasing possibility. Continued progress towards reducing occupational segregation requires that women succeed in entering a broader range of traditionally male occupations and/or a greater flow of men into traditionally female occupations.     

Age at marriage in Malaysia: a hazard model of marriage timing

"This paper estimates a proportional hazards model for the timing of age at marriage of women in Malaysia. We hypothesize that age at marriage responds significantly to differences in male and female occupations, race, and age. We find considerable empirical support for the relevance of economic variables in determining age at marriage as well as evidence of strong differences in marriage patterns across races."     

The associations between early life circumstances and later life health and employment in Europe

We use data from the Survey of Health, Aging, and Retirement in Europe to estimate for thirteen European countries the associations of early life circumstances—measured by childhood health and socioeconomic status (SES)—with educational attainment, and later life health and employment (at ages 50–64). In all countries and for men and women, favorable early life circumstances, and in particular a higher childhood SES, are associated with a higher level of education. In most countries and in particular for women, favorable early life circumstances are associated with better later life health, also when education is controlled for. The significant associations of favorable early life circumstances with a higher incidence of later life employment are mostly transmitted through education and later life health.     

Arab spring protests and women's labor market outcomes: Evidence from the Egyptian revolution

We analyze the effects of the 2011 Egyptian protests on the relative labor market conditions of women using panel data from the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey (ELMPS). Using unique information from the Statistical Database of the Egyptian Revolution, we geocode each “martyr”, i.e. demonstrators who died during the protests, based on the location of the political incident. We construct our measure of the intensity of the protests – the district-level number of “martyrs” – and rely on a Difference-in-Differences approach. We find that the 2011 protests have reduced intra-household differences in labor force participation by increasing women's employment and unemployment relative to men. Women's employment relative to men increased in both the private and informal sectors. Our estimates suggest how economic uncertainty such as the one associated to the recent protests may undermine the importance of cultural factors and attitudes towards female work. We link these findings to the literature showing how a relevant shock to the labor division between women and men may have long run consequences on the role of women in society.     

Intra‐household bargaining power and household expenditure allocation: Evidence from Iran

This article examines the role of intra‐household bargaining power on household expenditure patterns in Iran to see whether women’s empowerment can achieve similar results in Iran as we have seen it achieve in other countries of the world. This study is insightful because it tells us whether Iranian women, who have experienced both economic and noneconomic constraints over many years, can utilize increased power toward economic development. The bargaining power is measured by the sex ratio in the marriage market. Using the Household Income and Expenditure Survey in Iran, we find that greater bargaining power of women contributes significantly toward greater provision of education and health expenditure within the household, creating a potential for an increase in welfare for the next generation.