The inversion of married women's labour supply and wage: Evidence from Thailand

This study investigates the labour supply behaviour of married Thai women with reference to their own and their spouse's wages. Controlling for spousal education and number of children, the main findings indicate an inverse relationship between married women's labour supply and wages, contrary to the evidence from developed countries. The estimated own wage elasticity ranges from ?1.70 to ?2.40 and the cross elasticity ranges from ?0.16 to ?0.17, indicating that the impact of own wage on labour supplied is much larger than spouse's wage. The results from disaggregation classified according to different socioeconomic backgrounds also show negative elasticities between own and spouses' wage across all subgroups, except for those with university degrees and higher income.     

A synthetic cohort analysis of female labour supply: the case of Thailand

This study analyzes trends and patterns in employment, hours worked, and women’s wages for Thai women, and relations among these variables in models of female labour supply. Labour supply behaviour of Thai women is investigated with synthetic cohort data defined by age, year of birth, and level of educational attainment, constructed from annual labour force surveys from 1985 to 2004. According to pseudo-panel estimates, wage increases lead to a reduction in hours worked, but also an increase in the employment/population ratio, with elasticity estimates that are robust across a variety of specifications. Estimates based on disaggregation by marital status show that marriage provides protection against wage decreases, allowing married women greater choice between hours of work and other household activities. Alternative disaggregations find that younger cohorts of women and those with the highest education show the greatest (positive) response of the employment rate to wage changes, leading to a future Thai labour force with more women and higher educational attainment.     

The gender‐corruption nexus in Asia

This study investigates the relationship between the share of women in parliament and the level of corruption in a panel of Asian countries during the period 1997–2015. This study applies the instrumental variable (IV) fixed effect approach using a system of gender quotas, which are either reserved seats, legal candidate quotas, or voluntary political party quotas as instruments to control for unobserved heterogeneity across countries, and to alleviate endogeneity bias. In addition, the generalised method of moments (GMM) estimator is applied in order to address the persistence of corruption, which causes biased and inefficient estimators in estimation. The main finding is that a higher share of women in parliament is associated with a lower level of corruption, which is consistent with evidence from studies by Dollar et al. (2001) and Swamy et al (2001).     

Wage Consequences of Rapid Tertiary Education Expansion in a Developing Economy: The Case of Thailand

In recent years, Thailand has experienced the emergence of “overeducated” workers as the supply of university graduates in Thailand has outpaced growth in high‐skilled employment opportunities. Using the 2007 to 2009 Thai Labor Force Survey, this paper quantifies the incidence of overeducation and estimates overeducation wage penalties among male university graduates. The results show that the incidence of overeducation is greatest among younger cohorts. Quantile wage regression results suggest that overeducation wage penalties for older workers capture the impact of unobserved low ability on wages. In contrast, persistent wage penalties of 11–26% across the wage/ability distributions for younger workers are consistent with structural imbalances in the Thai labor market. These imbalances make it difficult for university graduates to find jobs commensurate with their level of formal education and to achieve their full earning power. The wage penalties are especially large for new entrants into the labor market.     

The returns to education and wage penalty from overeducation: New evidence from Vietnam

This study intends to estimate the rate of returns to education in Vietnam, the distributive effects of education on wages, and the wage penalty from the incidence of overeducation in the Vietnamese labor market during 2004–2016. This study employs a pseudo-panel approach to address omitted variables bias and the unconditional quantile regression to identify the heterogeneity of returns to education across the income distribution. Our main finding indicates that the estimated rate of returns to education in Vietnam is approximately 6.5%, showing a downward bias from previous estimates. The returns vary across wage distributions, where a lower rate of return is observed in lower quantiles and a higher rate among those individuals at the higher quantiles. The returns to education have declined since 2008, confirming the oversupply of highly educated workers in the Vietnamese labor market with an estimated wage penalty of 17%. Government assistance measures are needed to reduce the overeducation and the wage penalty issues in the Vietnamese labor market.