Migration and gender differences in the home labour market: Evidence from Albania

This paper examines the role of migration in affecting the labour market opportunities of male and female household members left behind. We address this question by analyzing the impact of international migration flows from Albania, where migration is a massive and male-dominated phenomenon. We find that the labour supply of men and women responds differently to current and past migration. Controlling for the potential endogeneity of migration, estimates show that having a migrant abroad decreases female paid labour supply while increasing unpaid work. On the other hand, women with past family migration experience are significantly more likely to engage in self-employment and less likely to supply unpaid work. The same relationships do not hold for men. These results suggest that while left-behind women in Albania may take on the extra burden associated with the migration of male family members, they gain employment opportunities upon their return.     

Young people living as couples: How women's labour supply is adapting to the crisis. Spain as a case study

In this paper, we focus on the effects of the Great Recession on the decisions of young women regarding their labour supply. Considering the profound effect of the economic recession on the Spanish labour market, and in particular on the labour supply of young people, the focus of the empirical part of this paper is on Spain. Using EU-SILC 2007 and 2012 micro data for Spain, the labour supply models of women are estimated by age group, with a particular focus on the 20 to 29 and 30 to 39 age bands, in order to establish how young women living in couples exhibit different labour supply propensities according to their partner's labour market status. Correction is made for the non-random selection of women living in couples in the younger age groups. This first analytical step reveals a negative effect on the likelihood of forming a new household in the context of precarious employment conditions. Analytical results regarding the labour supply of women by age group confirmed a discouraging effect of young children on the labour supply of the youngest mothers, as well as a positive effect from being the owner of a house purchased under mortgage.The literature shows that different effects can be at work within the crisis: an added worker effect (AWE), which is countercyclical labour supply behaviour involving an increase in individual labour supply in response to transitory shocks in the partner's earnings, and a procyclical discouraged worker effect. The resulting estimations of the present study suggest an AWE in 2012 for young women living in couples. While in 2012 the discouragement effect was only prevalent for women over 40, in 2007 it was also prevalent among younger women. Women's higher propensity to enter the labour market when their partner becomes unemployed or is persistently unemployed, coupled with their likelihood to be inactive in the presence of young children, would suggest a need for labour market policies targeted towards young women. Childcare facilities could mitigate the latter effect and produce a more continuous work profile, avoiding the negative effects of work experience interruptions on labour supply during the female lifecycle.     

Sectoral labour supply,choice restrictions and functional form

In this paper we discuss a general framework for analysing labour supply behaviour in the presence of complicated budget and quantity constraints, of which some are unobserved. The individual's labour supply decision is viewed as a choice from a set of discrete alternatives (jobs). These jobs are characterized by attributes such as hours of work, sector‐specific wages and other sector‐specific aspects of the jobs. The labour supply model for married women is estimated on Norwegian data. Wage elasticities and the outcome of a tax reform experiment show that overall labour supply is moderately elastic, but these modest overall responses shadow for much stronger inter‐sectoral changes. Our model is compared with a discrete choice model in which the utility is assumed to be a polynomial. We show that our estimated model has a more economically sensible interpretation and fits the data as well as the alternative approach. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A note on bride kidnapping and labour supply behaviour of Kyrgyz women

Using data from the 2011 and 2016 Life in Kyrgyzstan surveys, we examine Kyrgyz women’s labour supply elasticities at the extensive margin. We use Heckman’s two-step approach to predict earnings for the non-participating women and then use these predictions to estimate the participation equation. We find that women’s labour supply decision is not influenced by their earnings. We also show that there exists a significant gap in employment propensities among ethnic Kyrgyz women in consensual or arranged marriages compared to women in kidnapped-based marriages. This finding suggests that the practice of bride abduction adversely affects women’s probability of employment and might have negative consequences on their economic well-being.     

Low‐paid women: the impact of regulatory change in Australia

How is low‐paid work experienced and understood by women at a time of marked regulatory change? Using a qualitative methodology, we examine women's experiences under Work Choices to assess the impact of the new laws. As in other neoliberal environments, we find that labour standards can have marked effects on low‐paid workers; that heightened managerial prerogative leads to fear and insecurity; and that, in spite of all this, low‐paid women have significant pride in their work. Furthermore, the results of regulatory change go beyond the workplace to affect women as carers, citizens and community members.     

The disabling effects of enabling social policies on organisations’ human capital development practices for women

Paid parental leave and externally provided childcare are social policies designed to enhance parents' labour force participation. These policies influence not only men's and women's decisions regarding their labour market activity but also organisational decision makers' (ODMs) expectations about their employees' availability to work and thus, their willingness to invest in their employees' human capital. Using a sample of over 13,000 individuals from 19 countries, we investigate the interaction between gender and social policies on human capital development practices. In line with statistical discrimination theory, which suggests that ODMs hold different expectations about female and male productivity, we find that paid parental leave and externally provided childcare are negatively associated with the provision of human capital development for women but not for men.     

Connecting Time and Space: The Significance of Transformations in Women's Work in the City

Growing numbers of women with children living in western cities are entering the labour market, raising new questions about changes in the allocation of the tasks of social reproduction between household members and others and about the effects of the increasing time women now spend in the workplace. As Manuel Castells noted over 25 years ago, women's unpaid labour has long been essential, not only in the domestic arena, but also in patching together facilities separated in space. The spatial layout of cities, with its specialized and segregated land‐uses, only works, he argued, if women's unpaid labour is available to connect urban locations. But many women now spend many more hours in the labour market, replacing their former domestic labour with a range of commodified goods and services as well as by help from a range of related or unrelated others, sometimes but not always remunerated and/or by state‐provided or supported services. This article examines the consequences of the growth of women's employment in Britain and the concomitant decline of the old breadwinner family, the growth of workfare policies that assume all individuals are available for waged work and the rise of commodified caring. The arguments are illustrated by empirical examples from interviews undertaken with middle‐class mothers in waged work in London and Manchester in the UK.     

Land Market Restrictions,Women's Labour Force Participation and Wages in a Rural Economy

We analyse the effects of land market restrictions on the rural labour market outcomes for women. The existing literature emphasizes two mechanisms through which land restrictions can affect economic outcomes: collateral value of land, and (in)security of property rights. Our analysis focuses on an alternative mechanism where land restrictions increase costs of migration out of villages. Testable prediction of collateral channel is that wages remain unchanged, but the effects on labour force participation are ambiguous. Insecurity of property rights in land reduces labour force participation, but leaves wages undisturbed. In contrast, if land restrictions work primarily through higher migration costs, labour force participation increases, while wages decline. For identification, we exploit a natural experiment in Sri Lanka where historical malaria played a unique role in land policy. We provide robust evidence of a positive effect of land restrictions on women's labour force participation, but a negative effect on female wages. The empirical results thus contradict a collateral or insecure property rights effect, but supports migration costs as the primary mechanism.     

Travail domestique et espace-temps des femmes

The subject of this article is the division of labour between the sexes which is specific to capitalism, and the characteristics of the space-time of women. On the basis of works written by historians, we are trying to show that the present division of labour which sentences women primarily to domestic work and men to productive work, is linked to the specifically capitalist separation between production and reproduction. The whole sphere of reproduction where specialized institutions such as school or medicine are closely linked to the family, contributes, through the transformations of domestic work, to the establishment of new social relationships: the children are permanent objects of care and education, the women are defined in terms of mother-wives. Those transformations can be seen in those of the space and time of urban structures and housing. Now the space-time of women seems mainly structured by domestic work. Concrete elements underline it: for example the space-time imposed upon women is delimited by a series of prohibitions bearing upon those places and times that do not belong to domestic work. The constitution of this space-time is based upon the negation of women's work within production. Reformulated in terms of mobility, the space-time of women differs according to social classes but its main features stem from the division of labour between the sexes and the status of the mother-wife.     

Interlocking Lives: Employment Mobility and Family Fixity in Three Gentrifying Neighbourhoods of Montreal

This article explores the relationship between employment mobility, family fixity, and gentrification in the lives of 36 residents in and extended commuters to Montreal's southwest borough. Once described as the birthplace of industry in Canada, the neighbourhoods of Saint-Henri, Little Burgundy and Point Saint-Charles have undergone sweeping changes in recent decades. Inner-city areas are not necessarily where one expects to find mobile workers, but this is changing due to shifting gender roles, the rise of dual-income households and gentrification. Michael Savage's concept of ‘elective belonging’ proved particularly useful in understanding this connection. With its proximity to childcare, schools, stores and workplaces, the central city permits a more equitable division of labour within the household. Our place-based approach to mobile work enables us to capture a wide spectrum of experience, ranging from people with extended daily commutes to those whose work takes them away from home for days, weeks or months at a time. Our interviews reveal a connection between employment mobility and family gentrification, as upwardly mobile families find ways to localize other aspects of their lives. The simultaneity of mobility and immobility are often essential, especially in dual-income households. One parent's mobility often leads to the relative immobility of other family members.     

Immigrants’ Wage Growth and Selective Out‐Migration

This paper examines immigrant wage growth taking selective out‐migration into account using administrative data from the Netherlands. Addressing a limitation in the previous literature, we address the potential endogeneity of immigrants’ labour supply and out‐migration decisions on their earning profiles using a correlated competing risk model. We distinguish between labour and family migrants, given their different labour market and out‐migration behaviours. Our findings show that accounting for selective labour supply is as important as accounting for selective out‐migration. Controlling only for out‐migration selectivity would underestimate immigrants’ wage growth, whilst controlling only for labour market selectivity would overestimate their wage growth. This shows that different selections are important for different types of migrants.     

With a little help from abroad: The effect of low-skilled immigration on the female labour supply

We examine whether and how the inflow of female immigrants who specialize in household production affects the labour supply of Italian women. To identify the causal effect, we exploit the family reunification motives and network effects (i.e., the tendency of newly arriving female immigrants to settle in places where males of the same country already live) which is used as an instrument for the geographical distribution of female foreign workers. We find that when the number of immigrants who provide household services is higher, native Italian women spend more time at work (intensive margin) without affecting their labour force participation (extensive margin). This impact is concentrated on highly skilled women whose time has a higher opportunity cost. These results also hold after a battery of robustness checks. We present some further evidence that is also consistent with the idea that the impact works through substitution in household work rather than complementarities in the production sector. Finally, we show that immigration arises as a substitute to publicly provided welfare services, although this phenomenon raises concerns regarding the fairness and sustainability of this private and informal welfare model.     

Work–family conflict and the commodification of women's employment in three Chinese airlines

In the East, where gender is mediated by different family structures, societal institutions and economic development, the work–family conflict (WFC) metaphor remains appropriate. This paper investigates Chinese women's experiences of WFC in the fastest growing commercial airline sector in the world. It finds that, in contrast to the West, work-to-family, rather than family-to-work, conflict dominates. Liberalization, competition and commercialization have also had a significant gendered impact on jobs. The latter resulting in the commodification of women's aesthetic and emotional labour, job segregation, employment insecurity, poor career opportunities and increased WFC. We explore reasons why HR policies and practices in airlines fail to address women's workplace concerns and find that occupational status and lack of organizational power, together with the prevalence of traditional gendered norms and attitudes, play important roles     

Femmes et transports en milieu urbain

The purpose of this article is to attempt an approach to the problem of women in an 'urban setting'. Taking the Parisian region as an example, we analyse the ambivalent role played by transport in women's insertion in society. We try to pinpoint the determinants of women's mobility, one of the components of their way of life, considering both the availability of transport-public and individual-and the roles which are Allotted to women within the family. Stress is put on the prevalent contradictions which exist between the ideological norms of a patriarchal order which primarily bind women to the home and the requirements of the present capitalist system which needs them in the labour market while at the same time benefitting from certain aspects of the functioning of the family unit. Women are therefore constantly faced with the problems of reconciling family and domestic life with life outside the home. In this attempt at reconciliation, transport plays an important part.     

THE LABOUR FOOTPRINT: A FRAMEWORK TO ASSESS LABOUR IN A COMPLEX ECONOMY

As addressing labour becomes crucial in the move towards sustainability, there is the need for assessment tools suitable for current complex economic systems. This article presents an input–output based framework (‘labour footprint’) for evaluating labour issues behind the production of different economic commodities, including entire supply chains. In line with the guidelines of the International Labour Organization, six labour issues are considered: collective bargaining, forced labour, child labour, gender inequality, hazardous work, and social security. This conceptual article sets to (a) define this footprint's labour dimensions, (b) cite relevant data sources, (c) describe its calculation, (d) illustrate its application through a case study, and (e) discuss this framework's relevance from ‘conscious consumption’, ‘supply chain responsibility’, and regulators' standpoints. Since it advances the evaluation of fundamental labour issues and the scope of multi-criteria analyses, this footprint may be a valuable tool for sustainability assessments.     

Left behind to farm? Women's labor re-allocation in rural China

The transformation of work during China's rapid economic development is associated with a substantial but little noticed re-allocation of traditional farm labor among women, with some doing much less and some much more. We study how the health, work and time allocation of non-migrant women are affected by the migration of others in their household. We find little impact on their health outcomes but do find that the women left behind are doing more farm work than would have otherwise been the case. We show that this may be a persistent effect, and not just temporary re-allocation. In stark contrast, no such impacts are found for left-behind men.     

Feminisation of the medical profession: a strategic HRM dilemma? The effects of family‐friendly HR practices on female doctors' contracted working hours

Health‐care institutions face a strategic HR dilemma. They need to attract female doctors from a tight, feminised labour market by offering family‐friendly HR practices (e.g. part‐time employment), often based on collective labour agreements, while trying to contain their labour costs by employing as many full‐timers as possible. In this study, we investigate which family‐friendly arrangements serve health‐care institutions' HR strategies best in terms of retaining female doctors' working hours. Data collected in 2008 from 1,070 Dutch female doctors indicate that offering family‐friendly HR practices such as flexible working hours (in contrast to part‐time working) minimise the strategic HR dilemma, since it offers scope for improving the work–life balance without encouraging female doctors to work less hours. However, the effect of family‐friendly arrangements on working hours is dependent on the family‐friendly workforce philosophy: only with proper support for career goals do women using family‐friendly arrangements work more hours.     

The causal effect of the number of children on gender‐specific labour supply elasticities to the firm

We estimate the effect of the number of children on the female and the male wage elasticities of labour supply to the firm using instrumental variables estimation in data from the US Current Population Survey (2000–19). Parents' number of children is instrumented with the sex mix of their first two children. We find that the male wage elasticity of labour supply to the firm significantly increases with the number of children, while the female elasticity is not significantly altered. That is, we find evidence that male labour markets become more competitive with the arrival of children. Our results also show that firms have substantial monopsonistic power and, in line with the monopsony theory of the gender pay gap, that male labour markets are more competitive than female markets.     

The migration response to local labour market shocks: Evidence from EU regions during the global economic crisis

The global economic crisis has strongly affected Europe's economic geography. This study investigates the role of local labour market disparities in determining regional net in‐migration rates. While only a weak link is detected in the precrisis period, the local labour market context of migration grows significantly stronger during the crisis. Decompositions of the estimation results show that changes in migration rates are firstly a result of widened disparities across European regions throughout the crisis. However, also behavioural adjustment processes occur, e.g. an orientation of migrants towards urban areas and away from regions with persistently high long‐run unemployment rates.     

Balancing family and work: The effect of cash benefits for working mothers

The aim of this paper is to measure the potential effect of a family policy introduced in Spain in 2003 that provides working mothers with a monthly cash benefit of 100 euros per child aged under 3 years. We explore the effect of the policy on eligible women's labour market participation. In the tradition of the policy evaluation literature we use a difference-in-differences-in-differences (DDD) estimation approach. Our results support a small but significant positive effect of the policy. We find that since the implementation of the policy the labour market participation rate for mothers of children aged under 3 has risen by 3 percentage points compared to the rate for non-policy-eligible females. This represents 5% of their average labour market participation in 2002, the year before the policy was implemented. This overall policy effect is dominated by the effect of the policy among high school educated females.