Women,Children and Patience: Experimental Evidence from Indian Villages

Researchers have observed that women in developing countries often make more development friendly choices than men. We implemented experimental tasks among a large and diverse sample of married individuals in rural India and found women to make on average more patient and more risk‐averse choices than men. We find important heterogeneity in gender differences in patience: there is no difference for spouses with no children but patience levels diverge if there are small children in a family. The findings imply that conflicting spousal preferences are most likely in poor families with children.     

Education decisions and labour market outcomes

The financial return to a college degree is an increasing concern amid rising tuition costs and stagnant wages. Using the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS:2002), I analyse the effect of post-secondary choices on wages for individuals entering the labour force between 2004 and 2012. Matching methods provide evidence of strong returns to earning a bachelor’s degree for both genders, similar to previous literature. Relative to high school graduates, women see wage benefits of 8–21% for some college attendance. However, men see negative effects of between 6%–13% from some college relative to high school graduates. The returns to a sub-baccalaureate degree as compared to earning some two-year credits is between 8%–25% for women and 8–14% for men. Further, the wage returns to a sub-baccalaureate degree as compared to earning some four-year credits is between 9%–17% for women and 9–20% for men. This translates into an additional $2,500-$4,700 per year for women and an additional $2,900-$6,400 per year for men. Since the average respondent with some four-year college experience has 2.3 years of earned post-secondary credits, shifting some into sub-baccalaureate programs may substantially decrease both the financial and time commitments of post-secondary education while increasing the returns after degree attainment.     

IS IT WHERE YOU GO OR WHAT YOU STUDY? THE RELATIVE INFLUENCE OF COLLEGE SELECTIVITY AND COLLEGE MAJOR ON EARNINGS

All college students must decide where to attend college and what major to study. We estimate how earnings by college major differ at different college selectivity types. We find major‐specific earnings vary markedly by college selectivity, with the strongest differences among business majors and the weakest differences among science majors. We also find that when comparing earnings of graduates from top colleges to middle or bottom ranked colleges, the distribution of students across majors can be as important as earnings differences by major in accounting for college selectivity earnings gaps. (JEL I2, J3)     

Wealth,Wages, and Wedlock: Explaining the College Gender Gap Reversal

In this paper, I study the role of changes in the wage structure and expectations about marriage in explaining the college gender gap reversal. With strongly diminishing marginal utility of wealth and in the presence of a gender wage gap, single women have a greater incentive than single men to invest in education. Marriage‐market distortions tend to depress the overall benefit of education for women relative to men. I develop a tractable two‐period model and parameterize it using US census data for the cohort born in 1950. I then show that it can generate a reversal and that the most important driving force for this is the decline in marriage rates.     

Gender diversity,cash holdings and the role of the institutional environment: empirical evidence in Europe

While substantial evidence is emerging internationally on higher risk aversion among women than among men, there is less evidence on women’s business choices. We explore some of the reasons for the relationship between gender diversity and cash holdings. Specifically, this paper focuses on the choices involving the stock of cash held by firms in which women have executive roles and can consequently exert a crucial influence on the firms themselves. We estimate our proposed empirical models using a dataset of 12,466 observations from 18 European countries. We find a positive relationship between the presence of women with executive roles in the firm and cash holdings. Women tend to make more conservative choices probably because they are more risk averse than men are. This propensity has a relevant impact on the financial choices of firms when women play a leading role. Notably, the study demonstrates that the institutional environment and industry differences moderate our baseline relationship.     

Trust and gender: An examination of behavior and beliefs in the Investment Game

How does gender influence trust, the likelihood of being trusted and the level of trustworthiness? We compare choices by men and women in the Investment Game and use questionnaire data to try to understand the motivations for the behavioral differences. We find that men trust more than women, and women are more trustworthy than men. The relationship between expected return and trusting behavior is stronger among men than women, suggesting that men view the interaction more strategically than women. Women felt more obligated both to trust and reciprocate, but the impact of obligation on behavior varies.     

Does labour supply respond to a flat tax?

We exploit the exogenous change in marginal tax rates created by the Russian flat tax reform of 2001 to identify the effect of taxes on the labour supply of men and women. We apply a weighted difference‐in‐difference regression approach and instrumental variables to estimate labour supply functions using a panel dataset. The mean regression results indicate that the tax reform led to a statistically significant increase in hours of work for men but had no effect on work hours for women. However, we find a positive response to tax changes in both tails of the female work hour distribution. We also find that the reform increased the probability of finding a job among both men and women. Despite significant variation in individual responses, the aggregate labour supply elasticities are trivial. This suggests that reform‐induced changes in labour supply are an unlikely explanation for the amplified personal income tax revenues that followed the reform.     

Educational Attainment and the Gender Wage Gap: A Comparison of Young Men and Women in 1984 and 2007

This study pools data from two sources to investigate the role of educational attainment in determining the gender wage gap. The empirical analysis reveals that the returns to education remained largely unchanged for young men but declined significantly for young women over the period 1984–2007. We find significant evidence of a decline in the returns to a Bachelor's degree for young women as well as evidence of increasing wage inequality over time among young men and women with a Bachelor's degree. Also, in 2007, the gender wage gap between young men and women was largest for those with a Bachelor's degree. Further, our analysis suggests that young women with a college education may confront more discrimination in the labor market than young women without a college education. We conclude that promoting educational attainment among young women may be a necessary but not sufficient condition for addressing the gender wage gap.     

Preference for Risk in Investing as a Function of Trait Optimism and Gender

This research examines the role of gender and optimism on the riskiness of investment choices of students (N = 66) in a semester long investment contest with both monetary and academic incentives. Data suggest that males make more risky investment choices than females, and that this difference was primarily due to the riskier choices of optimistic males. In addition, males demonstrated greater variability in final portfolio value than did females. Our results suggest that 1) the well documented gender difference in investment strategies of men and women may be due to a specific subgroup of males (i.e., optimists); 2) that optimism may lead to different behavioral tendencies in men and women depending on the domain; and 3) that the benefits of optimism may be restricted to domains in which continued effort and information seeking are likely to lead to desired outcomes.     

Self‐Directed Pensions: Gender,Risk, and Portfolio Choices*

In this paper, I investigate gender differences in financial risk‐taking from a new perspective, and I show that gender plays a different role across the risk distribution. To evaluate risk‐taking, I exploit portfolio choices following a reform that entitles almost the entire Swedish workforce to choose a risk profile for a part of their public‐pension contributions. The novel finding is that portfolio risk does not differ much between the men and women who choose less risky portfolios, while the men who choose risky portfolios take on significantly more risk than do the women who choose risky portfolios. The findings are robust to investors choosing the default alternative, chasing past returns, rebalancing, and different measures of risk‐taking.     

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.     

The Hunger of Old Women in Rural Tanzania: Can Subjective Data Improve Poverty Measurement?

On average, women in Tanzania are slightly less likely than men to say that they are “always/often without enough food to eat”—but this masks a much higher rate of self‐reported food deprivation among elderly rural women. Official Tanzanian poverty statistics are, however, based on a methodology which presumes equal sharing per equivalent adult within the household. This paper combines subjective and objective micro‐data from Tanzania's 2007 Household Budget Survey and 2007 Views of the People Survey. By imputing individual consumption based on the relative probability of self‐reported food deprivation, it provides an example of the possible importance of one type of intra‐household inequality—i.e., the hunger of old women—for poverty measurement. Implications include the complexity of gendered intra‐household inequality and the importance of “technical” poverty measurement choices for public policy priorities, such as old age pensions.     

The College Wage Premium and the Expansion of Higher Education in the UK*

This paper reports estimates of the UK “college premium” for young graduates across successive cohorts from large cross‐section datasets for the UK pooled from 1994 to 2006—a period when the higher education participation rate increased dramatically. The growth in relative labour demand suggests that graduate supply considerably outstripped demand which ought to imply a fall in the premium. We find no significant fall for men and even a large, but insignificant, rise for women. Quantile regression results reveal a fall in the premium only for men in the bottom quartile of the distribution of unobserved skills.     

The aftermath of reunification

This article traces the evolution of the East German wage structure throughout the transition period 1992–2001. Wage dispersion has generally been rising. This increase occurred predominantly in the lower part of the wage distribution for women and in the upper part for men. Moreover, the sectoral transition affected female workers to a much larger extent than their male counterparts. A sequential decomposition analysis using quantile regressions reveals that changes in industry‐specific remuneration schemes contributed strongly to the rise in wage inequality in the lower part of the distribution for women, whereas changes in the industry composition alone would have led to a polarization of wages. In contrast, for men, changes in individual characteristics are the single most important factor contributing to the increasing wage dispersion. These gender differences are attributed to employment segregation across industries present right after German reunification.     

UNANTICIPATED EFFECTS OF CALIFORNIA'S PAID FAMILY LEAVE PROGRAM

We examine the effect of California paid family leave (CPFL) on young women's labor force participation and unemployment, relative to men and older women. CPFL enables workers to take at most 6 weeks of paid leave over a 12‐month period in order to bond with new born or adopted children, or to care for sick family members or ailing parents. The policy benefits women, especially young women, as they are more prone to take such a leave. However, the effect of the policy on overall labor market outcomes is less clear. We apply difference‐in‐difference techniques to identify the effects of the CPFL legislation on young women's labor force participation and unemployment. We find that the labor force participation rate, the unemployment rate, and the duration of unemployment among young women rose in California compared to men (particularly young men) and older women in California, and to other young women, men, and older women in states that did not adopt PFL. The latter two findings regarding higher young women's unemployment and unemployment duration are unanticipated effects of the CPFL program. We utilize robustness checks as well as unique placebo tests to validate these results.(JEL H43, J13, J18, J48)     

Labor Force Participation and Educational Attainment in the United States

The objectives of this paper are twofold. Aggregate labor force participation rates in the United States are described focusing on educational attainment. A model is developed for decomposing aggregate labor force participation rates for men and women from 1994 to 2014 from a unique perspective by focusing on changes in educational attainment and on changes in the labor force behavior. The findings presented here indicate that men’s aggregate labor force participation rates declined during the 20-year period at all levels of educational attainment, due primarily to changes in population shares. A different picture emerges regarding women. For women with high school or some college or associate degree, it was changes in labor force behavior that dominated changing aggregate labor force participation rates. For women with the lowest and highest levels of educational attainment, less than high school or at least a baccalaureate degree, it was changes in their population shares that drove changes in aggregate labor force participation rates.     

Collective Labour Supply: Heterogeneity and Non-Participation

We present identification and estimation results for the "collective" model of labour supply in which there are discrete choices, censoring of hours, and non-participation in employment. We derive the collective restrictions on labour supply functions and contrast them with restrictions implied by the usual "unitary" framework. Using the large changes in the wage structure between men and women in the U.K. over the last two decades, we estimate a collective labour supply model for married couples without children. The estimates of the sharing rule show that male wages and employment have a strong influence on bargaining power within couples.     

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.     

The impact of stress on tournament entry

Individual willingness to enter competitive environments predicts career choices and labor market outcomes. Meanwhile, many people experience competitive contexts as stressful. We use two laboratory experiments to investigate whether factors related to stress can help explain individual differences in tournament entry. Experiment 1 studies whether stress responses (measured as salivary cortisol) to taking part in a mandatory tournament predict individual willingness to participate in a voluntary tournament. We find that competing increases stress levels. This cortisol response does not predict tournament entry for men but is positively and significantly correlated with choosing to enter the tournament for women. In Experiment 2, we exogenously induce physiological stress using the cold-pressor task. We find a positive causal effect of stress on tournament entry for women but no effect for men. Finally, we show that although the effect of stress on tournament entry differs between the genders, stress reactions cannot explain the well-documented gender difference in willingness to compete.     

Gender differences in self‐employment

This paper examines the factors that influence transitions into self‐employment, paying particular attention to gender differences. We find that: (i) men are more responsive to the wage differential between wage/salaried employment and self‐employment; (ii) liquidity constraints are more important for men; and (iii) the link between father's self‐employment status and the probability of self‐employment is stronger for men. Taken together, these results suggest that, for women, self‐employment is a closer substitute for part‐time work and labour‐market inactivity than it is for men. We attribute such differences to the different labour market opportunities and occupational strategies of women.