Women's Economic Status in Rural China: Household Contributions to Male–Female Disparities in the Wage–Labor Market

Rapid industrial growth in China coupled with economic reforms in the rural areas has created a growing demand for rural women's labor, though often at substantially lower wages than those earned by men employed in the same sector. An analysis of data collected in rural Guangdong province suggests that households may contribute to the observed male–female market wage differential through their influence in the formation of individuals' reservation wages. Under these circumstances, external employment opportunities, while no doubt serving to increase the household's overall level of income, may, on their own, be a less effective mechanism for raising the economic status of women. On the contrary, market wage signals may serve to reinforce, rather than to ameliorate, sex-based differences that arise within the household.     

YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT,FIRM SIZE AND RESERVATION WAGES IN SOUTH AFRICA

The level of youth unemployment in South Africa is much higher than in comparator countries. We investigate whether one of the reasons may be that the wages young people want or need are above those that they could reasonably expect to earn given their characteristics. Unlike previous work on the relationship between reservation wages and unemployment we differentiate between wages in different sizes of firms. Larger firms pay more and thus, even if reservation wages are similar to average predicted wages, they may be above the wages that young people could expect to earn in smaller firms. We find that this is the case.     

Trends in the Male-Female Wage Gap: The 1980s Compared with the 1970s

Despite a more rapid increase in female work behavior in the 1970s than in the 1980s, the male-female wage gap in the 1970s narrowed one-eighth as quickly as in the 1980s. This paper uses 1972 through 1988 Panel Study of Income Dynamics data to explain why women's wages rose less quickly in the 1970s. It illustrates how new female labor market entrants in the 1970s brought down mean female wages, thereby driving down female wage growth. This decline played itself out in the 1980s as the relative growth in female labor market entrants diminished and as the proportion of women's potential work years actually worked increased.     

Real wages and the family: Adjusting real wages to changing demography in pre-modern England

This paper uses demographic data drawn from Wrigley et al.'s (1997) family reconstitutions of 26 English parishes to adjust Allen's (2001) real wages to the changing demography of early modern England. Using parity progression ratios (a fertility measure) and age specific mortality for children and parents, model families are predicted in two reference periods 1650–1700 and 1750–1800. These models yield two levels of interesting results. At the individual family level, we can measure how different families' real wages changed over the family life cycle as additional children were born. At the aggregate level, we can predict thousands of families using Monte Carlo simulation, creating a realistic distribution of median family real wages in the economy. There are two main findings. First, pregnancy and lactation do not create cyclical effects in the family's income. Instead, most families' welfare ratios decline steadily across the family life cycle until children begin to leave the household, increasing the welfare ratios. Second, Allen's real wages understate or match the median of the predicted demography-adjusted distributions.     

Wage Effects of Employment Protection Legislation in Taiwan

This study investigates the effects of employment protection on wages. The implementation of employment protection legislation increases employers' firing costs and reduces labor turnover, and, therefore, results in lower wages. Our empirical results show that the implementation of Taiwan's leads to a reduction in wages, the effects of which varies with the stringency of the law's enforcement. In addition, employment protection can lead to a decrease in wage dispersion, implying the worsening of job matches.     

Living standards and the life cycle: reconstructing household income and consumption in the early twentieth-century Netherlands†

Conventional methods of measuring historical household living standards are often criticized because of the omission of women's and children's wages and non-wage income; the focus on urban centres; and the exclusion of life-cycle changes in household composition, income, and consumption. This article presents a method that accounts for these issues and applies it to agricultural and textile households in the early-twentieth century Netherlands. It uses total household income, as opposed to the husband's wage, as the enumerator for calculating alternative welfare ratios. The results show that welfare ratios were not only structurally higher than those based on the male-breadwinner model, but also followed a different life-cycle trajectory. Furthermore, household portfolios were diversified and depended on local labour market structures. Thus, the study concludes that analyses based on men's wages only reflect the rough outlines of how households functioned.     

Mistaken wages: the cost of labour in the early modern English economy,a reply to Robert C. Allen

This article responds to Robert C. Allen's reply to my new wage evidence for London, 1650–1800. The day rates Allen relies upon are not ‘wages’, and the evidence clearly points to a large difference between existing estimates and actual wages earned. His use of the piece rate in understanding earnings is significant, but cannot support a ‘high wage’ thesis. International comparisons that take new evidence into account do not show English wages to be any higher than elsewhere in Europe.     

The Manpower Law of 2003 and its implementing regulations: Genesis,key articles and potential impact

This paper reviews Indonesia's Manpower Law 13/2003 and related regulations, against a backdrop of slow employment growth, business concerns about the legislation and government attempts to change it in 2006. The paper focuses on severance rates and dismissals, short-term contracts and out-sourcing, and minimum wages, also briefly discussing other articles, and comparing the law with those in neighbouring countries. It suggests that certain articles have contributed to significantly higher wage costs and reduced flexibility in the management of labour in Indonesia's formal sector, even though compliance is by no means universal within the private sector. Key provisions, especially large increases in severance rates, and needs criteria imposed for the purpose of setting minimum wages, are also out of step with labour market policies in other developing countries. Circumstantial evidence suggests that these measures have adversely affected the investment climate and damaged prospects for a recovery in employment.     

Male White-Black Wage Gaps, 1979-1994: A Distributional Analysis

This paper examines whether the “stretching” (increased variance of wages) of the skill distribution during the 1980s explains the growth in within-group white-black wage gaps. The paper also develops a skill-specific decomposition that measures the stretching's contribution to the wage gap's growth at various skill levels of the distribution. The “local” nature of the skill-specific decomposition breaks the correlation between changes in the position of blacks in the white residual distribution and changes in the variance of wages, thus yielding unbiased estimates of the degree to which the stretching explains changes in the wage gap. The paper shows that if the wage distribution's stretching is an important contributor to the overall wage gap's growth, its greatest impact is at the middle and upper portions of the skill distribution. For wage gaps within education and experience categories, the stretching's contribution is greatest at the tails of the skill distributions.     

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.     

Losing the thread: a response to Robert Allen†

In an earlier article we used archival and printed primary sources to construct the first long-run wage series for hand spinning in early modern Britain. This evidence challenged Robert Allen's claim that spinners were part of the ‘high wage economy’, which he sees as motivating invention, innovation, and mechanization in the spinning section of the textile industry. We respond to Allen's subsequent criticism of our argument, sources, and methods, and his presentation of alternative evidence. Allen contends that we have understated both the earnings and associated productivity of hand spinners by focusing on part-time and low-quality workers. His rejoinder rests on an ahistorical account of spinners’ work and similarly weak evidence on wages as did his initial claims. Our augmented version of the spinners’ wages dataset confirms our original findings. Spinners’ wages were low even compared with other women workers, and neither wages nor the piece rates that determined unit labour costs followed a trajectory that could explain the invention and spread of the spinning jenny.     

MINIMUM WAGE POLICY AND ITS IMPACT ON EMPLOYMENT IN THE URBAN FORMAL SECTOR

Since the late 1980s, minimum wages have become an important plank of the Indonesian government's labour policy. Their levels have increased faster in real terms than those of average wages and per capita gross domestic product and, as a result, minimum wages have become binding for the majority of formal sector workers. This study finds that the imposition of minimum wages has a negative and statistically significant impact on employment in the urban formal sector. The disemployment impact is greatest for female, young and less educated workers, while the employment prospects of white-collar workers are enhanced by increases in minimum wages. Some workers who lose jobs in the formal sector and have to relocate to the informal sector face lower earnings and poorer working conditions.     

Wages,Productivity and Labour's Declining Income Share in Post‐Apartheid South Africa

The Marikana incident in 2012, as well as the protracted strikes by platinum miners, metal and postal workers in 2014 suggest that not all is well in the South African labour market. Even though those in employment are better off than the unemployed poor, macroeconomic data indicate that labour's share in gross value added has declined significantly during the first two decades following the first democratic election in 1994. A falling share of labour in income also means, by definition, that average labour productivity growth outstrips real wages growth. Data for South Africa suggest that productivity has indeed increased faster than wages in South Africa. This article argues that financialisation and more aggressive returns‐oriented investment strategies applied by for instance large investment institutions translated into higher required rates of return on capital, which in turn caused an increased implementation of capital‐augmenting labour‐saving technology that reduces labour's share in income.     

Real wages once more: a response to Judy Stephenson

This article examines Judy Stephenson's claim that institutional wage series such as those of Greenwich Hospital overstate the earnings of building workers by 20 to 30 per cent, and it is argued here that the conclusion is unpersuasive. Whatever adjustments to existing wage series are necessary in view of her new evidence would have no significant implications for real wages in England compared to the rest of the world. Consequently, Stephenson's findings do not call into question the high wage explanation for the industrial revolution.     

Job Search Behaviour and Time Preferences: Testing Exponential Versus Hyperbolic Discounting

This article examines the effects of time preferences on job search behaviour and tests the exponential versus the hyperbolic discounting model. Theoretically, the relations between time preferences and job search intensity, reservation wages and the exit rate depend on whether exponential or hyperbolic discounting is assumed. By analysing these relations empirically we test which model of intertemporal choice better explains the results. Using the DNB Household Survey, a Dutch longitudinal survey, we capture variation in time preferences by a psychological construct that measures an individual’s future orientation. The empirical results are consistent with the hyperbolic discounting model.     

On the puzzling slowdown of wage and productivity growth in Taiwan: evidence from a comparison with South Korea

Since the early 2000s, the growth rate of real wages in Taiwan has been very low, even negative for high‐skilled workers. This paper sheds light on the potential causes of this puzzling development through a comparison of Taiwan's performance with that of South Korea. In many dimensions, most notably wages and labour productivity, both economies developed quite similarly between 1995 and 2001–02, but diverged thereafter. We relate the development of wages and labour productivity in the two economies to sectoral structural change and to sectoral differences in labour productivity growth, skills upgrading, and foreign trade.     

Why married women's labor supply in the Netherlands has increased

Summary On the basis of cross-section data sets for 1979 and 1987 we determine: 1) the relative contribution of changes in participation and in hours of work to the increase in married women's labor supply; 2) how much of the change in participation and hours of work is determined by changes in preferences and in budget constraints; and 3) the causes of changes in market wages and reservation wages. The increase in the average unconditional hours of work is much more due to the rise in the participation rate than to the increase in conditional hours of work. Preference changes have contributed positively to the increase in married women's labor force participation over the period 1979–1987, whereas changes in market opportunities have contributed negatively. The change in the market wage and the reservation wage can be attributed mainly to changes in the population structure of married women. Changes in the model structure contributed negatively to the change in the real market and the reservation wage. The positive effect of the change in the population structure dominates the negative effect of the model structure. Finally, participants in the labor market have a comparative wage advantage over non-participants. Non-participants are a self-selecting group with a relatively high reservation wage.We like to thank Joop Hartog, Jules Theeuwes, Isolde Woittiez and two anonymous referees for their comments on a previous draft of this paper.     

Poverty or prosperity in northern India? New evidence on real wages, 1590s–1870s†

This article introduces a new dataset on wages in northern India (from Gujarat in the west to Bengal in the east) from the 1590s to the 1870s. It follows Allen's subsistence basket methodology to compute internationally comparable real wages to shed light on developments in Indian living standards over time. It adjusts the comparative cost-of-living indices to take into account differences in climate and caloric intake due to variances in heights. The article also discusses the male/female wage gap in northern India. It demonstrates that the ‘great divergence’ started in the late seventeenth century, and widened further after the 1720s and especially after the 1800s. It was subsequently primarily England's spurt and India's stagnation in the first half of the nineteenth century that brought about most serious differences in the standard of living. If the British colonial state is to blame—as often suggested by the literature on India's persistent poverty—the fault lies in its failure to improve the situation after the British became near-undisputed masters of India in 1820.     

Spatial spillovers of regional wages: Evidence from Chinese provinces

This study investigates the effects of spatial interactions on local wages based on a panel data from 31 Chinese provinces between 2001 and 2010. Using the Global Moran's I statistic, we provide empirical evidence for the presence of spatial dependencies in provincial wages. Then, we estimate the provincial wage equation using a spatial panel model that controls for spatial heterogeneity and spatial interdependence as well as other regional characteristics. The empirical results show that spatial wage spillover plays an important role in the determination of local wages. Furthermore, we find that human capital and economic growth are two underlying forces strengthening wage spillovers across provinces.