J. S. Mill on Wages and Women: A Feminist Critique

"J. S. Mill on Wages and Women" questions the common belief that Mill, despite his feminism, never suggested an end to the sexual division of labor because of his devotion to the concept of efficiency and other tenets of classical economics. A review of Mill's analysis of a competitive labor market indicates that he believed it to be fully consistent with women's equality in the workforce. In fact, in his works on women, it becomes clear that Mill was concerned that the logical extension of classical economic principles might lead to the commodification of domestic duties, including child rearing, a notion he evidently feared. Therefore, it was Mill's fear of, rather than dedication to, extreme allegiance to efficiency and unimpeded capitalism that limited his feminism.     

The Effect of Child Care Subsidies: A Critique of the Rosen Model

In an influential article, Sherwin Rosen (1997) argues that Swedish subsidies of child care services lead to a substantial misallocation of resources that slows economic growth. We offer two major reasons why Rosen's approach is flawed. First and foremost, he ignores the positive externalities of increasing the quality of child care, despite their clear relevance to his general equilibrium model. Second, he overlooks distributional impacts, despite evidence that child care subsidies redistribute the costs of children between men and women, rich and poor, young and old. By exploring these and a number of smaller problems with Rosen's model we hope to encourage the development of more systematic efforts to explore the effects of state support for child rearing.     

Gender equality and economic growth in Brazil: A long-run analysis

This paper studies the long-run impact of policies aimed at fostering gender equality on economic growth in Brazil. The first part provides a brief review of gender issues in the country. The second part presents a gender-based, three-period OLG model that accounts for women’s time allocation between market work, child rearing, human capital accumulation, and home production. Bargaining between spouses depends on relative human capital stocks, and thus indirectly on access to infrastructure. The model is calibrated and various experiments are conducted, including investment in infrastructure, a reduction in gender bias in the market place, and a composite pro-growth, pro-gender reform program. The analysis showed that fostering gender equality, which may partly depend on the externalities that infrastructure creates in terms of women’s time allocation and bargaining power, may have a substantial impact on long-run growth in Brazil.     

Changes in women's hours of market work: The role of returns to experience

Over the past several decades, married women's hours of market work increased significantly in the US. I argue that changes in behavior by married women with children account for much of this change. In particular, the pattern of married women's work hours has changed substantially over the life cycle. In the past, married women in childbearing age tended to specialize in childrearing and home production activities at the expense of engaging in market work. Now they do not curb the hours they work in the market.What factors contribute to this change in behavior? In this paper, I focus on relative changes in returns to experience as an explanation. I use PSID data for the 1970s and the 1990s to estimate the extent to which relative returns to experience have changed. I then use a life-cycle model with human capital accumulation and home production to quantitatively assess the consequences of this increase for married women's hours of work over the life cycle.The estimates of the human capital production function show that women's marginal returns to experience increased by 25% across decades, whereas men's increased by only 6%. I show that this relative change accounts for 96% of the observed variation in married women's hours of work. Moreover, according to the model, the increase in returns to experience accounts for roughly half of the increase in the female/male wage ratio that is found in the data. I also show that a decline in the gender wage gap, holding returns to experience constant, accounts for only 18% of the total increase in hours of work. As a consequence, it cannot explain the change in the shape of women's life-cycle profiles. Although the focus of the analysis is the labor supply behavior of women, the model also allows predictions about the behavior of men and single women. These predictions are consistent with the data.     

EFFECTS OF A CHILD'S DISABILITY ON AFFECTED FEMALE'S LABOUR SUPPLY IN AUSTRALIA

Australia has experienced a growing rate of child disability, with the rate of 3.7 per cent in 1998 increasing to 4.3 per cent in 2003 for children aged under four years and from 9.5 per cent to 10 per cent for children aged five to 14 years in the same period. However, surprisingly no study has examined the economic effects of child disability in the Australian context. This paper attempts to quantify the link between a child's disability and the work behaviour of the female in the affected family. Our findings provide empirical justifications for the current policy linking the severity level of child disability to the assessment of eligibility for Carer Payment (Child). We also found that child disability has different impacts on the labour market activities of married women and non‐married women. It appears that child disability imposes a greater hardship on non‐married women than on married women in terms of work choice decision. Once non‐married women manage to enter the labour force, they may have to stay on to work as usual even if they have a disabled child, because they may not have other family members to turn to for help as married women do.     

The impacts of women's land ownership: Evidence from Vietnam

Women's equal access to and control over economic resources such as land are integral to achieve gender equality and sustainable economic development. This study evaluates the impacts of women's land ownership on various women's and household's outcomes in the context of Vietnam. We discuss the beneficial effects of allowing women to own more land on both women and their families. In particular, there is a positive association between women's land ownership and intra-household bargaining power in various aspects. In particular, the relationship is the strongest for women's autonomy in decisions regarding their children. It is also easier for land-holding women to formally access credit and invest in human capital. We further study the favorable effects of women's land ownership on their families in terms of spending and saving behaviors. Finally, women's land ownership also contributes to household social capital. These findings lend support to the passage and implementation of laws intended to grant women equal rights to the ownership and control over land.     

Family policy,intrahousehold bargaining,and child health

This study examines the effects of an exogenous change in family policy in Ethiopia on women empowerment and the allocation of resources toward child health. Empowerment is formalized as an unobserved latent variable based on a large set of questions pertaining to women's autonomy and decision-making power. Exploiting the time and regional variation in the implementation of the law, the study finds that early implementation of the reform increases women's access to information, literacy and education levels, and their assertiveness toward family planning and domestic violence. In addition, more decision power in the hands of women is found to have a positive impact on investments in the health and nutrition of children. The findings suggest that factors that do not enter the individual's preferences may affect outcomes for individuals and emphasize the role of intrahousehold heterogeneity. The results are robust to a battery of validity and specification checks.     

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.     

Assortative mating in the online market for sperm donation

Previous studies on assortative mating have struggled to isolate preferences from actual constraints faced throughout the matching process, including the geographic and social propinquity that limit the availability of possible mates. Because such passive factors restrict the possibility set of potential partners, they may either restrict the chance of fulfilling mating preferences or lead to a high level of positive assortative mating. The possibility set may be further reduced by competition in the mating market. It is also unclear from couple’s data how much assortative mating is driven by partner selection to reduce anticipated child rearing problem and how much by a desire for parental assistance and altruistic preferences for offspring. Adopting the online market for sperm donation as the research setting reduces such problems: the more controlled setting ensures isolation of a male’s genetic impact on his offspring from other factors. By identifying the factors that influence the symmetry of characteristics between recipients and partners and recipients and donors chosen, we provide empirical evidence that even with limited constraints on available choice, women still exhibit homogamous donor preferences. Likewise, by exploring how potential donors’ characteristics match partner characteristics, we offer insights into what drives recipients’ desires to find donors who surpass both their own and their partners’ characteristics.     

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.     

Access to infrastructure and women’s time allocation: Implications for growth and gender equality

Improved access to infrastructure is commonly viewed as a critical step to increase women’s labor force participation and promote economic growth in developing countries. This positive relationship is first established in a basic gender-based, overlapping generations model with collective households and congestion costs. The model is then extended to account for endogenous gender bias in the market place and women’s bargaining power, as well as fertility choices and rearing time. Numerical experiments, based on a calibrated version of the extended model, show that increased access to infrastructure may induce women to devote more time to child rearing – in line with the model’s predictions and some of the empirical evidence – thereby mitigating the increase in time allocated to market work. As a result, it may weaken the benefits of increased female labor force participation in terms of reduced gender bias in the market place, improved women’s bargaining power in the family, and higher growth rates in the long run.     

Child Schooling and Work Decisions in India: The Role of Household and Regional Gender Equity

Abstract

This paper tests three hypotheses about how mothers' autonomy in India affects their children's participation in school and the labor market. To do so it extends the concept of mothers' autonomy beyond the household to include the constraints imposed by the extent of gender equity in the regions in which these women live. This study began with the expectation that increased autonomy for Indian mothers living in heterosexual households would increase child schooling and decrease child work. However, the results are mixed, indicating that mother's autonomy can be reinforced or constrained by the environment. The paper concludes that mothers and fathers in India make different decisions for girls vis-à-vis boys and that the variables reflecting mothers' autonomy vary in their impact, so that mothers' level of education relative to fathers' is not often statistically significant, while mothers' increased contributions to household expenditure decrease the probability of schooling and girls' work.     

FERTILITY RISK IN THE LIFE CYCLE

In this article, I study fertility decisions with special emphasis on the timing of births and abortions over the life cycle. Given the policy debate regarding abortion availability and recent evidence of its positive impact on women's outcomes, understanding the fertility process should help guide the discussion. Here, I present a life‐cycle model of consumption–savings and fertility decisions in an environment with uninsurable income shocks and imperfect fertility control. My model presents a framework in which both opportunity costs of child rearing and technological restrictions (in the form of contraception effectiveness) have roles shaping lifetime fertility choices.     

Marriage,cohabitation and women's response to changes in the male wage structure

Using microdata and grouped data that cover the period 1996 to 2006, we assess the extent to which cohabiting women adjust their labour supply to a lesser extent, if any, than married women in response to changes in male wages. Both microdata regressions and grouping estimators unambiguously indicate that cohabiting women respond less to variation in male wages than married women. However, the magnitude of the difference is not sizeable. We also assess the magnitude of married men's and cohabiting men's own wage elasticities and find that they do not differ much. Combined with the fact that male earnings account for roughly two-thirds of family earnings, these two findings explain why the impact of changes in male wages on family earnings is very similar for married couples and cohabiting couples: in both cases, a 10% decline in male wages appears to induce roughly a 6% drop in family earnings.     

城市居民环境友好行为意向形成机制的性别差异

利用在海口市的调查数据,分析环境友好行为意向形成的性别差异。结果发现：①女性报告的环境友好行为意向强于男性;②影响男女环境友好行为意向形成的因素不同,产生机制也不同。环境敏感度、环境态度、反应效能感是男性环境友好行为意向的预测因子,后果意识对男性的环境友好行为意向形成具有调节作用;环境敏感度、环境行动知识、反应效能感与后果意识是女性环境友好行为意向的预测因子;在特定条件下,环境行动知识对女性的环境友好行为意向形成具有调节作用。研究结果能为居民环境教育,尤其是进行性别差异化教育提供科学依据。     

Household formation rules,fertility and female labour supply: Evidence from post-communist countries

This paper explains how household formation rules affect the fertility and labour supply of women in the Former Soviet Union and neighbouring countries. Women who bear a male first child in countries dominated by traditional, patrilocal households are shown to have substantially lower subsequent fertility from those whose first child is female. Where households are generally nuclear, male first borns do not reduce subsequent fertility. Middle-aged women in more patrilocal contexts often work less if their first child is male, despite reduced fertility and being more likely to reside with a daughter-in-law. In more nuclear contexts, they tend to work more. These findings suggest that household formation rules are strongly related both to women’s demand for sons and to the direction of intergenerational transfers.     

Parental expectations and school enrolment decisions: Evidence from rural Ghana

We use field data to investigate factors that influence parents' decisions to enrol children in schools in rural Ghana. The empirical results identified a host of socio‐economic and household‐level factors including remittances parents expect from investing in education, parents perception of a child's desirable professions, cost of schooling and discount rate as significant determinants of parental school enrolment decision. When gender of the child and remittances are taken into account, we show male parents are more likely to invest in education of boys than girls because they expect significantly higher returns from their investment in boys. Female parents do not show such gender preference. The proportion of children enrolled in school is positively related to average cost of schooling for male parents Gender of parent plays a significant role in school enrolment decision making.     

Parental compensatory behaviors and early child health outcomes in Cebu,Philippines

A dynamic optimization model of parents choosing investments in their children's health motivates an empirical model of parents' choices of health inputs for their children and the impacts of these decisions on their children's subsequent health. Estimates of the child health input demand functions and the child health production functions from the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey accord with the prediction that optimizing behavior results in higher levels of aggregate child health. Observable parental behaviors respond to the physical developmental status of their children. These parental responses appear to yield large and statistically significant improvements in children's early physiological outcomes. However, because some health inputs choices are not observable, it is impossible to ascertain whether these measured effects are due solely to variations in the observed input choices.     

Altruism in individual and joint-giving decisions: What's gender got to do with it?

Abstract

This paper uses dictator experiments to examine gender differences in altruistic behavior in the United States when decisions are made individually and jointly. In anonymous individual giving to charity, women give substantially more than men, and in paired settings, mixed-sex groups give the most while all male pairs give the least. Evidence supports social information and negotiation effects as participants change giving toward that of their partners. Social image effects are found only in mixed-sex groups, indicating a gender-based component to the value of the social signal sent. Although men and women appear to have similar influence, the positive social image effect pushes giving in mixed-sex pairs above the sum of the members' individual gifts because the less altruistic partners (usually men) adjust their giving upward more than the more altruistic partners (usually women) reduce giving. Therefore, increasing women's participation in traditionally male spheres of decision making may result in more altruistic economic behavior.