Do young women trade jobs for marriage? A skeptical view

This paper takes a skeptical view of the theory that the slight decline in young women's labor-force participation from 1985 to 1990 can be explained by the fact that there are fewer women now in their early twenties than there are men in their late twenties so that women currently have more bargaining power in the marriage market than men do.The paper argues that the assumption behind this theory, that for women marriage and employment are substitutes, is outmoded. It also contends that the theory leaves out the importance of full-time schooling as an activity alternative to employment and that in fact the increase in full-time schooling among young women has been much greater than the slight decrease in their labor-force participation.Several questions are raised about the statistical test of the theory and also about the reasons why the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page article on the slight decline in young women's labor-force participation and featured the marriage market theory as an explanation for this purported new trend.     

The Impact of Transportation Infrastructure on Women's Employment in India

ABSTRACT

Indian women's labor force participation is extremely low, and women are much less likely than men to work in the nonfarm sector. Earlier research has explained women's labor supply by individual characteristics, social institutions, and cultural norms, but not enough attention has been paid to the labor market opportunity structure that constrains women's labor market activities. Using data from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) in 2004–05 and 2011–12, this study examines how village transportation infrastructure affects women's and men's agricultural and nonagricultural employment. Results from fixed-effect analysis show that access by paved or unpaved roads and frequent bus services increase the odds of nonagricultural employment among men and women. The effect of road access on nonfarm employment (relative to not working) is stronger among women than among men. Improved transportation infrastructure has a stronger positive effect on women's nonfarm employment in communities with more egalitarian gender norms.     

Why Are Women Delaying Motherhood in Germany?

Abstract

German fertility trends show that the average age at which women have their first child has increased in recent decades. Moreover, researchers have argued that delayed maternity is an important factor in reduced fertility. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), this paper contributes to the debate about maternity timing and reduced fertility in Germany by analyzing some of the factors determining the delay of motherhood. The results suggest that German women who have accumulated more years of education and longer work experience at the time of marriage delay motherhood more. On the other hand, women with higher labor income and a higher contribution to household income delay motherhood less. The results confirm that women consolidate their careers before motherhood in order to reduce career costs. Therefore, if fertility rates are to be increased in Germany further policies that aim to combine women's careers and motherhood need to be developed.     

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.     

Married women's labor supply and economic development: Evidence from Sri Lankan household data

Women's labor supply in Sri Lanka has increased steadily since the early 1990s following economic reforms, but remains well below the level predicted by national income, a feature shared by a number of Asian and Latin American countries that have undergone similar reforms and economic growth. To understand the microeconomic determinants of women's work in Sri Lanka's growing economy, this paper estimates a binary‐choice model of married women's labor supply using household survey data spanning a 23‐year period. Decomposition and cohort analysis reveal that women have been drawn into the workforce through falling fertility rates, rising tertiary education, and declining income effects among younger generations, but other factors have undermined this positive trend. Educational attainment reduces married women's labor supply except at the tertiary level, consistent with social stigmas associated with married women in non‐white‐collar employment. The strict sectoral segregation of married women by education level supports this hypothesis. In addition, growth has been concentrated in low‐skilled sectors with self‐employment more prevalent, reducing employment prospects of educated women and prompting their labor force withdrawal. This suggests it is the structure of economic development, rather than speed, that matters for women's labor force activity.     

Women Managers and The Gender-Based Gap in Access to Education: Evidence from Firm-Level Data in Developing Countries

A number of studies explore the differences in men's and women's labor market participation rates and wages. Some of these differences have been linked to gender disparities in education access and attainment. The present paper contributes to this literature by analyzing the relationship between the proclivity of a firm having a top woman manager and access to education among women relative to men in the country. The study combines the literature on women's careers in management, which has mostly focused on developed countries, with the development literature that has emphasized the importance of access to education. Using firm-level data for seventy-three developing countries in 2007–10, the study finds strong evidence that countries with a higher proportion of top women managers also have higher enrollment rates for women relative to men in primary, secondary, and tertiary education.     

Women's Intrahousehold Decision-Making Power and Their Health Status: Evidence from Rural Ethiopia

ABSTRACT

This study examines how various determinants of women's decision-making power affect their health status in rural Ethiopia. It identifies the determinants of women's decision-making power using a qualitative survey conducted over 2008–9, and it investigates their effects on women's health status using the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey panel dataset for the period 1994–2004. The study finds that women's health status is positively associated with their education, the number of brothers they have, whether they live in their birthplace, and whether their age is close to that of their husband. In contrast, women's health is negatively associated with whether they are in a marriage of their choice compared to an arranged marriage. The study concludes that multiple factors originating from context-specific gender norms affect women's decision-making power and have differential effects on women's health outcomes.     

FAMILY PLANNING AND WOMEN'S EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT: EVIDENCE FROM THE ONE‐CHILD POLICY

This paper exploits China's one‐child policy (OCP) to study the relationship between fertility and educational attainment of the mothers of China's “sibling‐less generation.” I take two difference‐in‐differences approaches to estimate the OCP's effect on women's education: one compares gender difference among the ethnic majority group and the other compares ethnicity differences between ethnic majority women and ethnic minority women. I also explore the heterogeneity of the policy's effects by parent's status at the Communist Party. I find that the OCP has a positive and significant effect on women's education and explains about half of the increase in educational attainment for women born between 1960 and 1980. Their increased educational attainment associates with delayed entry into first marriage, delayed entry to parenthood and increased labor supply. (JEL I20, J13, J16, J18)     

The Editorial Boards of Italian Economics Journals: Women,Gender, and Social Networking

In Italy, women's advancement in economics has been curtailed by the structure of editorial boards of Italian economics journals. In this paper, we examine the presence of men and women economists on the editorial boards of thirty-six Italian economics journals published since 1970 and analyze the gender distribution across different kinds of boards, roles, and fields. Because boards are hierarchically ordered, women work mostly in the lower positions, and the increase in women's participation has led only to more "editorial secretaries." Since men and women tend to have different scientific interests and men's standards of academic value prevail, women economists cannot build publication records as strong as those of their male colleagues, which, in turn, affects women's hiring, promotion, and wages, as well as the shape of the discipline.     

Passing the “Torches of Freedom”: Smoking Behaviors of Women in Nepal

Globally, men constitute a larger percentage of smokers than women, but the rate of women smokers is growing. Smoking is a feminist issue: there are unique consequences for women's health, well-being, and agency. Recently passed anti-smoking legislation in Nepal, which has the highest rate of women smokers in South Asia, omits gender-conscious recommendations, potentially diminishing the impact of the legislation on women's lives. Relying on the 2001, 2006, and 2011 waves of the Nepal Demographic and Health Survey, this paper expands the dialogue around women's smoking and places it at the forefront of research on women's health issues. The results indicate that for women in Nepal, formal education and visiting a health facility mitigate smoking behaviors, whereas being employed and living in certain regions promotes smoking behaviors. The aim is for this and the ensuing inquiries to change government anti-smoking legislation in order to improve women's health.     

Women's education and economic well-being

Evidence across regions in the world reveals patterns in school enrollment ratios and literacy that are divided along gender lines. In the developing world, apart from most countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, enrollment ratios of girls lag behind those for boys at all levels of education. Worldwide literacy rates for adult men far exceed those for women. While educational progress has been enjoyed by both sexes, these advances have failed to eradicate the gender gap. Education enhances labor market productivity and income growth for all, yet educating women has beneficial effects on social well-being not always measured by the market. Rising levels of education improve women's productivity in the home which in turn can increase family health, child survival, and the investment in children's human capital. The social benefits from women's education range from fostering economic growth to extending the average life expectancy in the population, to improving the functioning of political processes. This paper reviews recent empirical research that analyzes the benefits of women's education, describes the importance of women's education for country-level measures of economic development, and examines the implications of a gender gap in education for aggregate social well-being.     

Marriage traditions and investment in education: The case of bride kidnapping

The cultural practice of bride kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan may alter the returns to education for young women in an ambiguous direction due to two competing effects. On the one hand, women facing a risk of kidnapping may reduce education investment due to uncertain returns. Alternatively, since kidnapping is less likely to occur while a woman is in school, women may increase education investment to lower their personal risk of being kidnapped into marriage. Understanding how education is affected by kidnapping risk allows us to better anticipate changes in education when the laws are enforced and the risk declines. We develop a two-period utility model to highlight the effects of kidnapping risk on education and to help identify those girls who are most likely to increase their education when faced with positive regional kidnapping risk and thus most likely to reduce education if the risk is eliminated. We test the implications of the theory empirically using the Life in Kyrgyzstan data. Difference-in-difference regression results point to a negative relationship between regional kidnapping rates and education, suggesting that the elimination of kidnapping is likely to induce higher education rates of women in Kyrgyzstan. The results are informative to the literature at the intersection of marriage traditions, women's bargaining power and education attainment.     

The timing of first marriage and subsequent life outcomes: Evidence from a natural experiment

We study the consequences of later marriage on subsequent life outcomes. China’s family planning policies in the early 1970s – before the One-Child Policy – regulated not only childbirth but also marriage. The recommended minimum marriage age of 25 years for men and 23 years for women was effectively relaxed when the government formally introduced the One-Child Policy and put greater emphasis on directly controlling fertility rather than marriage. Subsequently, we find that the marriage age, which had been increasing steadily since 1970, suddenly started to decline in the early 1980s. This policy shift provides us with an opportunity to apply a regression probability jump and kink design for the purpose of identification. Using data from the 2000 census, we establish that later-married men have fewer children and that later-married women are more likely to participate in the labor market. We find no consistent evidence that later marriage improves education, probably because most Chinese people marry after completing their education.     

Gender Differences in Time-Poverty in Rural Mozambique

Based on time-use data from a 2013 primary household survey, this study examines the nature and extent of time-poverty experienced by men and women in peasant households in Mozambique. The main findings indicate that while women's labor allocation to economic activities is comparable to that of men, household chores and care work are almost entirely women's responsibility. The heavy burden of responsibilities leave women significantly time-poorer compared to men. Women's time-poverty worsens when the burden of simultaneous care work is taken into account. In addition, due to multitasking, the work tends to be more taxing. The examination of determinants of time-poverty shows that common measures of individual economic power, such as assets and education, do not necessarily affect the time-poverty faced by women.     

Who moves? A logit model analysis of inter-provincial migration in Canada

This paper addresses the topic of inter-provincial migration in terms of the basic question: ‘Who moves?’. Panel logit models of the probability that an individual changes his or her province of residence from one year to the next over the 1982–1995 period are estimated using tax-based longitudinal data. It is found that moving is (i) inversely related to the home province's population size, presumably reflecting local economic conditions and labour market scale effects, while language also plays an important role; (ii) more common among residents of smaller cities, towns, and especially rural areas than those in larger cities; (iii) negatively related to age, marriage, and the presence of children for both men and women; (iv) positively related to the provincial unemployment rate, the individuals’ receipt of unemployment insurance (except Entry Men), having no market income (except for Entry Men and Entry Women), and the receipt of social assistance (especially for men); (v) (slightly) positively related to earnings levels (beyond the zero earnings point) for prime aged men, but not for others; and (vi) more or less stable over time, with men's rates declining slightly and women's holding steadier or rising slightly, indicating a divergence in trends along gender lines.     

Task Routineness and Trade Policy Preferences

Understanding the formation of individual trade policy preferences is a fundamental input into the modeling of trade policy outcomes. Surprisingly, past studies have found mixed evidence that various labor market and industry attributes of workers affect their trade policy preferences, even though recent studies have found that trade policy can have substantial impacts on workers' incomes. This paper provides the first analysis of the extent to which task routineness affects trade policy preferences using survey data from the American National Election Studies. We find significant evidence that greater task routineness leads workers to be much more supportive of import restrictions, consistent with recent evidence on how trade openness puts downward pressure on employment and wages for workers whose occupations involve routine tasks. In fact, other than education levels, task routineness is the only labor market attribute that displays a robust correlation with individuals' stated trade policy preferences. We also provide evidence that there are some interactions between the economic and non‐economic factors in our study. For example, women's trade policy views are much more invariant to their labor market attributes than men, suggesting that women's views on this issue are driven more by personal and ideological beliefs than men.     

Women's Empowerment and HIV Prevention in Rural Malawi

This study examines the impact of women's empowerment on attitudes toward HIV prevention using the Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Project (MDICP), a panel dataset of over 1,200 married women in rural Malawi from 1998 to 2008. Results indicate that an increase in women's bargaining power promotes adequate HIV prevention strategies, namely condom use within marriage and HIV-related spousal communication. Own income, language skills, and awareness of options outside marriage also play an important role. By estimating a constant for each individual in the sample, the analysis controls for the impact individual-specific, nonmeasurable characteristics have on attitudes toward prevention. It captures the impact of HIV campaigns and increases in HIV prevalence over time on prevention behavior by using (regional) time trends. The findings are highly comparable across different econometric specifications and suggest substantial gains from placing greater emphasis on women's empowerment to effectively combat the spread of HIV, particularly in developing countries.     

Negotiating Domestic Labor: Women's Earnings and Housework Time in Australia

Abstract

Recent research in the United States has found that wives' absolute earnings level is more important than their earnings relative to their spouses in determining time spent on housework. Utilizing data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, this article examines whether women's housework time in Australia is associated with relative or absolute earnings and extends previous work by examining possible mechanisms linking women's earnings with their time on housework, outsourcing through the use of paid domestic help, and unmeasured heterogeneity among women. The research finds that women's housework time is more strongly affected by women's relative earnings than by their absolute earnings, and neither outsourcing nor unobserved heterogeneity can explain the relationship between women's earnings and their housework time in Australia. These results indicate that Australia has a strong male-breadwinner institutional framework that continues to hinder gender equality in paid and unpaid work.     

CROSS‐BORDER MARRIAGE COSTS AND MARRIAGE BEHAVIOR: THEORY AND EVIDENCE

This article analyzes cross‐border marriages between mainland China and Hong Kong (HK). We examine the effects of a reduction in cross‐border marriage costs following an increase in marriage‐migration quotas and the handover of HK to China. We find that cross‐border marriages mainly involve men from the low tail of the HK attribute distribution. We also find that HK women's position in the marriage market and within households deteriorated following the reduction in cross‐border marriage costs and that their disadvantaged position exerts an incentive effect on their labor market behavior. These outcomes are consistent with our matching model.     

Do not sell marriage short: Reply to strober

This paper explains why marriage market conditions may affect the participation of women in the labor force. In particular, it is claimed that changes in cohort size affect marriage market conditions and therefore women's labor-force participation. The paper also indicates how a theory of labor and marriage based on market analysis can possibly help women's causes. The paper first addresses theoretical issues raised by Strober. It then responds to her critique of empirical work.