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.     

Influence of body image in urbanized areas: differences in long-term changes in teenage body mass index between boys and girls in Japan

Japanese prefecture level panel data for the period 1986?C2003 was used to analyze and compare the determinants of teenage body mass index (BMI) by sex. Major findings through random effects estimation were as follows: BMI was not influenced by the degree of population density in males and younger females. However, the BMI of 16-year-old females was markedly lower in more densely populated residential areas. These findings suggest that girls who reach adolescence are more likely to diet and that this tendency is more distinct in more urbanized areas.     

The effects of cognitive ability and high school quality on college entry decisions: nonparametric estimation of parameters of interest

The decisions to attend college are analysed and nonparametric predictions compared to those obtained from the widely used logit model. The impacts of measured cognitive ability and proxies for high school quality on the decisions to attend college are examined for a sample of white and black males and females from the USA. Two different parameters of interest which isolate the effects of ability and high school quality on college entry decisions are described and estimated by ‘integrating out’ the effect of other covariates. It is found that measured cognitive ability is an extremely important determinant of college entry for all race and gender groups. At the same point in the ability distribution, blacks are more likely to select into college than whites, and females more likely than males of the same racial group. Proxies for high school quality such as teacher education, student teacher ratios, school enrolment and library size are shown to have little or no effects on the likelihood of college entry for all race and gender groups. Further, predictions obtained from the flexible nonparametric analysis are found to be quite similar to those obtained from the logit model, suggesting that simpler fully parametric binary choice models perform quite well as modelling college entry decisions.     

Has the large firm training advantage declined during the 2000s?

The study examines data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) and finds a falling incidence of job training in the United States during the period between 2001 and 2009. It also reveals that the firm size-training advantage in which larger firms are more likely to provide employer-paid training than their smaller counterparts has diminished. For the workforce overall, 34.5 percent (for males) to 25.4 percent (for females) of the difference in training between 2001 and 2009 is attributable to a decline in the large firm training advantage. For younger prime-age workers, the falling firm size-training effect is an even larger part of the overall decline in training, amounting to 51.8 percent of the difference in training between 2001 and 2009 for males and 33.9 percent for females.     

Unemployment and international shadow economy: gender differences

Adding to the body of research on cross-country determinants of the informal economy, this article studies how unemployment differences across gender drive the propensities to work in the informal sector. Results, accounting for possible simultaneity between unemployment and the shadow economy, show that unemployed males, rather than unemployed females, were more likely to operate underground. These findings about greater male propensities are generally robust to alternative considerations.     

Revisiting Occupational Crowding in the United States: A Preliminary Study

In her study of occupational segregation in the United States using the 1960 Census, Barbara R. Bergmann found black males with low levels of education more concentrated in low-skill service and laborer occupations than white males and virtually excluded from higher status occupations. Utilizing a crowding index which, similar to Bergmann's, controls for the education level of the worker, this paper presents an analysis of the employment patterns of black males and females in fifty-nine occupations in Wayne County (Detroit, Michigan) and Allegheny County (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) in 1990. Within blue-collar and service employment, males are under-represented in the craft occupations and concentrated in low-skill operative, laborer, and service occupations. Females are under-represented in both craft and operative occupations and concentrated in low-skill service occupations. Within white-collar employment, both males and females are largely excluded from high-skill private sector managerial occupations. Black representation in public sector managerial and private sector professional occupations is better in Detroit than Pittsburgh. The decline in manufacturing employment in both counties has left black males with fewer occupational options and black females over-represented in low status clerical and service occupations.     

Gender difference in the impact of retirement on cognitive abilities: Evidence from urban China

This paper examines the impact of retirement on cognitive functioning by gender in urban China and investigates the underlying mechanisms. Based on data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, the paper uses the mandatory retirement ages and different policy enforcement between the public and private sectors as instruments for retirement status. The analysis finds substantial gender heterogeneity in the effect of retirement on cognition, with a positive and significant effect for males, but a negative and less significant effect for females. The beneficial effects on cognition are stronger for male blue-collar workers, who are likely to pursue a more active lifestyle at retirement. Further investigation shows that the results are partly driven by differential behavioral changes at retirement, and the gender difference in retirement ages may also play a potential role.     

Sex and the City

Throughout the industrialized world, young women outnumber young men in urban areas. This paper proposes that such a pattern may be linked to higher male incomes in urban areas. The argument is that urban areas offer skilled workers better labor markets. Assuming that there are more skilled males than females, this alone would predict a surplus of males. However, the presence of males with high incomes may attract not only skilled females but also unskilled females. Thus, a surplus of women in urban areas may result from a combination of better labor and marriage markets. Swedish municipality data support the results.     

Effect of Secondary School Fees on Educational Attainment*

In this study, the heterogeneity of the fee abolition process in West German secondary schools is used to identify the effect of school fees on educational attainment and to obtain an estimate of the price elasticity of upper secondary education. The analysis is based on representative individual‐level data from three annual surveys of the German Mikrozensus. While coefficients cannot be estimated precisely, the results suggest that, on average, upper secondary school attainment increased by at least 8 percent in response to the fee abolition. The educational attainment of females appears to be more price sensitive than that of males.     

Labor markets and mating markets: Using taxes to reduce the male–female pay gap

Recently, Frank and McKenzie (J Bioecon 8(3):269–274, 2006) pointed out that beside discrimination, there is a further reason for a wage gap between males and females: If females value partner wages more than males in the mating market, this would increase the pay gap. In this paper, it is analyzed whether there exist policies that may improve the position of females and males from a distributional point of view without destroying the signal females want about the labor market success of males. First-best redistribution policies require the knowledge of the male and female wage preferences. Because this information is not available, a first-best redistribution policy seems infeasible. As an alternative policy, a differentiated wage tax is considered which is less information demanding than a first-best policy. It is shown that a welfare increasing wage tax scheme does exist and that an adequately chosen wage tax scheme may decrease the gender wage gap without destroying the desired signal of wages for labor market success.     

Does advertising increase labour supply? Time series evidence from the UK

Wages in industrialized countries have risen considerably during the last 50 years, whereas hours worked, for manual workers at least, have decreased only marginally. In Europe, one policy response has been to attempt to protect workers from pressure to work long hours by placing legal restrictions on the amount of hours that may be worked each week. This paper examines the possibility that, in fact, observed hours may be the result of a desire of workers to work longer due to a shift in their preferences from leisure to increased consumption, caused by the huge increase in mass media advertising. A cointegrating VAR framework is used to test this hypothesis on UK time series data for both males and females from 1952 to 1997. Advertising is shown to be positively associated with hours worked for both male and female series. Causality tests indicate unidirectional causality, for males and females, from advertising to hours worked. These results suggest that the European policy response is more likely to restrict employee rather than employer discretion over hours.     

GENDER EARNINGS DIFFERENCES IN CHINA: BASE PAY,PERFORMANCE PAY,AND TOTAL PAY

We utilize a data set that has not been used in literature—the Life Histories and Social Change in Contemporary China (LHSCCC)—to provide new evidence on male‐female pay differences in China. The data set not only enables us to control for a wide range of pay‐determining characteristics but also is the first to enable an analysis of the different components of pay (e.g., base pay and performance pay) as well as for total pay. We find: (1) Women receive about three‐quarters of male pay for each of the dimensions of base pay, performance pay, and total pay, before adjusting for the effect of different pay‐determining factors; (2) Approximately two‐thirds of the gap reflect the fact that females tend to be paid less than males for the same wage‐determining characteristics (often labeled as discrimination), while about one‐third reflects the fact that males have endowments or characteristics that tend to be associated with higher pay, especially supervisory responsibilities, general labor market experience, occupational skills, education, and membership in the Communist party; (3) Marriage has a large positive effect on the earnings of women in China (and none for men), but childcare responsibilities for children under the age of 6 have a large negative effect on the earnings of women although these are offset almost completely if an elder family member is present, highlighting that childcare responsibilities disproportionately fall on women unless an elder family member is present; (4) Pay premiums for higher level skills and higher supervisory ranks are remarkably small for both males and especially females; (5) With respect to the unexplained or “discriminatory” portion of the gap, females get a huge pay penalty for simply being female, but a substantial portion of this gets offset by the higher pay premium they receive for such factors as Han ethnicity, being married, and education. This suggests that discrimination tends to occur in the form of a pay penalty for simply being female and not from lower returns to the same endowments of pay‐determining characteristics. (JEL J3, J7, M5)     

Costs and Benefits of Bycatch Reduction Devices in European Brown Shrimp Trawl Fisheries

Discarding of juvenile fish is a wellrecognised problem in shrimp fisheries. In manycases, these fish are commercial species that,if not caught, could increase the productivityof other fisheries. In January 2003, Europeanlegislation was implemented by Member Statesrequiring all vessels fishing for brown shrimpto use selective trawls in order to minimisethe bycatch of other commercial species. Incomplying with the regulations, however, thecatch rate of the target species (the shrimp)is likely to be reduced. In this paper, we usea bioeconomic model to assess the impact ofbycatch reduction devices on fishing effort,catch and profitability in the European Crangon fisheries. The potential benefits (interms of higher future yields and consequentlyhigher profits) to the white-fish fisheries arealso estimated. From the model results, theregulation is expected to result in a netreduction in the profitability of the shrimpfishers. However, the benefits to thewhite-fish fishers is expected to more thanoffset this cost, resulting in an overall netbenefit.     

New facts on infidelity

We establish new empirical facts, in line with the recent theoretical literature on infidelity. Infidelity displays seasonality and state dependence. In the US socioeconomic status is not a driver of infidelity and females and males are equally likely to be unfaithful.     

Surrender Value of Capital Assets: The Economics of Strategic Virginity Loss

This paper provides the first econometric analysis of rationalizations of virginity loss in terms of love. Data from the UK National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles are used to estimate logit equations to predict the claim that virginity loss was occasioned by being in love. The sample consists of 2,269 males and 1,476 females between the ages of 16 and 59. In economic terms, a dichotomy is found in terms of male and female virginity loss, such that to a degree it is possible to infer that sex is for males more of a consumption good, whilst for females it is more of a capital good. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The human capital consequences of civil war: Evidence from Guatemala

We combine data from the 2002 National Population Census and the distribution of the number of human rights violations and victims across 22 departments to examine how Guatemala's 36-year-long civil war affected human capital accumulation. The year of birth and the department of birth jointly determine an individual's exposure during school age to three different periods of the civil war, namely the initial period (1960-1978), the worst period (1979-1984), and the final period (1985-1996). We find a strong negative impact of the civil war on the education of the two most disadvantaged groups, namely rural Mayan males and females. Among rural Mayan males, those who were school age during the three periods of the civil war in departments where more human rights violations were committed completed 0.27, 0.71, and 1.09 years less of schooling respectively whereas rural Mayan females exposed to the three periods of the war completed 0.12, 0.47, and 1.17 years less of schooling respectively. Given an average of 4.66 and 3.83 years of schooling for males and females, these represent declines of 6, 15, and 23% for males and 3, 12, and 30% for females. Our results are robust to the inclusion of indicators for department of residence, year of birth, and controls for different trends in education and human development in war-affected and peaceful departments of Guatemala and suggest that the country's civil war may have deepened gender, regional, sectoral, and ethnic disparities in schooling.     

An empirical analysis of occupational expectations

Empirical research on the subject area of occupational choice has generally focused upon outcomes; that is, in terms of occupational attainment, gender and racial segmentation, and male–female earnings differentials. But individual preferences, in terms of which occupation to pursue, are likely to be of equal importance in considering many of these issues. Therefore, this paper is concerned with an empirical analysis of the occupational expectations of minimum-aged school-leavers. A logit analysis is performed to establish what independent variables are more important in determining which labour queue school-leavers join. This is followed by the implications of the analysis for policy makers and practitioners concerned with the youth labour market. The evidence shows that there are clear differences in the occupational expectations of males and females. For instance, female school-leavers are more likely to seek entry to clerical and other non-manual occupations, such as retailing and catering. Males, on the other hand, have a higher probability of seeking entry to craft occupations like engineering and construction. However, account must also be taken of other personal characteristics when considering occupational choice in this context. Indeed, both human capital and other ‘personality’ variables are shown to have a statistically significant influence upon the occupational expectations of minimumaged school-leavers.     

MENTAL HEALTH AND LIFE SATISFACTION OF YOUNG AUSTRALIANS: THE ROLE OF FAMILY BACKGROUND*

This paper uses the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey to investigate the factors that influence young Australians’ mental health and life satisfaction, with an emphasis upon the role of family background. It also explores male and female differences concerning those background effects. The results indicate a particularly significant negative association between parental divorce and well‐being, and suggest that the timing of divorce matters. Distinguishing the samples by gender shows that this relationship remains significant only for females. Past living arrangements consistently turn out to be statistically insignificant whether the sample used is the total, males or females. The current living arrangements, however, appear to be significantly associated with both mental health and life satisfaction of males. Adding potentially confounding characteristics to our basic regression, which includes only the family background variables, suggests that some of the ‘aggregate’ effects of family background might work indirectly through the mediating variables such as education or lifestyles, though most of them remain direct. Among those, marital status, education, labour market experience and lifestyles seem to be the major factors explaining the dispersion in well‐being of young Australians. Income and wealth, on the other hand, have only a minor impact.     

RELATIVE TEACHER SALARIES AND THE DECISION TO TEACH

Using the 3‐year microdata sample of the American Community Survey for 2009–2011, we examine the effect of state‐level public school teacher salaries relative to those of other college graduates in the state not employed in education on the decision to teach. We find that relative teacher salaries in the state positively affect the share of education majors that are employed as public school teachers at the time of the survey. The effect for males majoring in math, science, and computer education is largest among all estimated effects. A statistically significant effect is also found among females majoring in elementary education. (JEL H75, I20, R23)