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on Demographic Economics |
| By: | Hallberg, Daniel (Swedish Social Insurance Inspectorate (ISF)); Johansson, Per (IFAU); Josephson, Malin (Swedish Social Insurance Inspectorate (ISF)) |
| Abstract: | This paper studies empirically the consequences of retirement on health. We make use of a targeted retirement offer to army employees 55 years of age or older. Before the offer was implemented in the Swedish defense, the normal retirement age was 60 years of age. Estimating the effect of the offer on individuals' health within the age range 56-70, we find support for a reduction in both mortality and in inpatient care as a consequence of the early retirement offer. Increasing the mandatory retirement age may thus not only have positive government income effects but also negative effects on increasing government health care expenditures. |
| Keywords: | health, mortality, inpatient care, retirement, health care, pensions, occupational pensions |
| JEL: | J22 J26 I18 |
| Date: | 2014–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp8260&r=all |
| By: | Bertrand, Marianne (University of Chicago); Black, Sandra E. (University of Texas at Austin); Jensen, Sissel (Norwegian School of Economics); Lleras-Muney, Adriana (University of California, Los Angeles) |
| Abstract: | In late 2003, Norway passed a law mandating 40 percent representation of each gender on the board of publicly limited liability companies. The primary objective of this reform was to increase the representation of women in top positions in the corporate sector and decrease gender disparity in earnings within that sector. We document that the newly (post-reform) appointed female board members were observably more qualified than their female predecessors, and that the gender gap in earnings within boards fell substantially. While the reform may have improved the representation of female employees at the very top of the earnings distribution (top 5 highest earners) within firms that were mandated to increase female participation on their board, there is no evidence that these gains at the very top trickled-down. Moreover the reform had no obvious impact on highly qualified women whose qualifications mirror those of board members but who were not appointed to boards. We observe no statistically significant change in the gender wage gaps or in female representation in top positions, although standard errors are large enough that we cannot rule economically meaningful gains. Finally, there is little evidence that the reform affected the decisions of women more generally; it was not accompanied by any change in female enrollment in business education programs, or a convergence in earnings trajectories between recent male and female graduates of such programs. While young women preparing for a career in business report being aware of the reform and expect their earnings and promotion chances to benefit from it, the reform did not affect their fertility and marital plans. Overall, in the short run the reform had very little discernable impact on women in business beyond its direct effect on the newly appointed female board members. |
| Keywords: | gender discrimination, board of directors |
| JEL: | J1 J3 |
| Date: | 2014–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp8266&r=all |
| By: | Loken, Katrine Vellesen (University of Bergen); Lundberg, Shelly (University of California, Santa Barbara); Riise, Julie (University of Bergen) |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we use a 1998 reform in the federal funding of local home-based care for the elderly in Norway to examine the effects of formal care expansion on the labor supply decisions and mobility of middle-aged children. Our main finding is a consistent and significant negative impact of formal care expansion on work absences longer than 2 weeks for the adult daughters of single elderly parents. This effect is particularly strong for daughters with no siblings, and this group is also more likely to exceed earnings thresholds after the reform. We find no impacts of the reform on daughter's mobility or parental health, and no effects on adult sons. Our results provide evidence of substitution between formal home-based care and informal care for the group that is most likely to respond to the parent's need for care – adult daughters with no siblings to share the burden of parental care. These results also highlight the importance of labor market institutions that provide flexibility in enabling women to balance home and work responsibilities. |
| Keywords: | formal and informal care, elderly, welfare state, women's career |
| JEL: | J14 J22 |
| Date: | 2014–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp8267&r=all |
| By: | Matthias Doepke; Fabrizio Zilibotti |
| Abstract: | We develop a theory of intergenerational transmission of preferences that rationalizes the choice between alternative parenting styles (as set out in Baumrind 1967). Parents maximize an objective function that combines Beckerian altruism and paternalism towards children. They can affect their children’s choices via two channels: either by influencing children’s preferences or by imposing direct restrictions on their choice sets. Different parenting styles (authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive) emerge as equilibrium outcomes, and are affected both by parental preferences and by the socioeconomic environment. Parenting style, in turn, feeds back into the children’s welfare and economic success. The theory is consistent with the decline of authoritarian parenting observed in industrialized countries, and with the greater prevalence of more permissive parenting in countries characterized by low inequality. |
| Keywords: | Intergenerational preference transmission, altruism, paternalism, entrepreneurship, innovation |
| JEL: | D10 J10 O10 O40 |
| Date: | 2014–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zur:uceswp:008&r=all |
| By: | Martina Kirchberger |
| Abstract: | Children are increasingly treated as active members in the household.� However, their preferences over consumption and leisure are rarely modelled.� This paper considers heterogeneity in siblings' preferences over leisure and consumption and builds a theoretical and empirical model for children's time and consumption allocations in a household.� We test the predictions of the model with unique data from Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam which contain detailed information on time use and allocations of assignable goods for sibling pairs.� We find that conditioning on observable variables, the residuals of these simultaneous decisions are significantly negatively correlated.� This suggests that differences in siblings' relative time and consumption allocations are driven by their relative preferences over leisure and consumption rather than differences in parents' relative altruism.� Families seem to function as market economies in which children trade off leisure and consumption, select their optimal bundle, and are rewarded by their parents accordingly. |
| Keywords: | Intra-household allocation, children |
| JEL: | D1 J1 J2 |
| Date: | 2014–07–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:oxf:wpaper:713&r=all |
| By: | Madeeha Gohar Qureshi (Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, Islamabad); Saman Nazir (Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, Islamabad); Hafsa Hina (Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, Islamabad) |
| Abstract: | Keeping into consideration the far-reaching social and economic impact of child work both for the children involved and society as a whole, in this study an attempt has been made to disentangle the child employment and schooling tradeoff with perspective to understand the effect of income deprivation measures and other non-income factors such as demographic and parental background information for Pakistan using Pakistan Panel Household Survey 2010 data set. At one level this research resolves empirically the debate that exist in literature whether child work is direct outcome of poverty or not in context of Pakistan through assessing the impact of the poverty channel for both likelihood of sending a child for paid work versus probability of enrolling a child into school and on other tries to connect the above line of reasoning with other non-income channels so as to build more enriching perspective. The consequences of household socioeconomic level in terms of its poor or non-poor status on child employment and child enrollment likelihood functions is assessed using both a direct measure of poverty based on household consumption expenditure information and also indirect measures based on access (or lack of it to be more specific) of household to electricity, sewerage system and to type of housing in terms of number of rooms and durability of house. In our empirical evidence, we do find strong support for poverty channel both directly and indirectly acting as defining force in decreasing his or her probability for school enrollment. However in context of effect of poverty on probability of child employment we do not find strong evidence through direct measure of poverty based on household consumption information, however the indirect proxies of poverty level of the household as child belonging to poor status in terms of access to certain type of living [living in house with no electricity, kaccha type of house (not bricked and hence vulnerable to fall), no sewerage system and with just one room] do provide strong evidence in support of poverty channel of impact on increasing the chances of child work. Further demographic information whether it is in form of increasing sibling size or impact of number of adult earners or parental background variables such as employment status of parents and their employment categories provides support for the significance of how being resource poor can be a binding constraint for the household and can act as an impetus to send a child towards paid work against schooling. |
| Keywords: | Child Employment, Child Schooling, Discrete Regression and Qualitative Choice Models |
| JEL: | C24 C25 I21 J13 J16 |
| Date: | 2014 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pid:wpaper:2014:105&r=all |
| By: | Lasse Eika; Magne Mogstad; Basit Zafar |
| Abstract: | We investigate the pattern of educational assortative mating, its evolution over time, and its impact on household income inequality. To these ends, we use rich data from the U.S. and Norway over the period 1980-2007. We find evidence of positive assortative mating at all levels of education in both countries. However, the time trends vary by the level of education: Among college graduates, assortative mating has been declining over time, whereas low educated are increasingly sorting into internally homogenous marriages. When looking within the group of college educated, we find strong but declining assortative mating by academic major. These findings motivate and guide a decomposition analysis, where we quantify the contribution of various factors to the distribution of household income. We find that educational assortative mating accounts for a non-negligible part of the cross-sectional inequality in household income. However, changes in assortative mating over time barely move the time trends in household income inequality. This is because the decline in assortative mating among the highly educated is offset by an increase in assortative mating among the low educated. By comparison, increases in the returns to education over time generate a considerable rise in household income inequality, but these price effects are partly mitigated by increases in college attendance and completion rates among women. |
| JEL: | D31 I24 J12 |
| Date: | 2014–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:20271&r=all |
| By: | Martin Binder; Alex Coad |
| Abstract: | Unemployment has been robustly shown to strongly decrease subjective well-being (or "happiness"). In the present paper, we use panel quantile regression techniques in order to analyze to what extent the negative impact of unemployment varies along the subjective well-being distribution. In our analysis of British Household Panel Survey data (1996-2008) we find that, over the quantiles of our subjective well-being variable, individuals with high well-being suffer less from becoming unemployed. A similar but stronger effect of unemployment is found for a broad mental well-being variable (GHQ-12). For happy and mentally stable individuals, it seems their higher well-being acts like a safety net when they become unemployed. We explore these findings by examining the heterogeneous unemployment effects over the quantiles of satisfaction with various life domains. |
| Keywords: | Subjective Well-being; Unemployment; Quantile Analysis; Heterogeneity; British Household Panel Survey; Domain Satisfaction |
| JEL: | I31 J01 J64 |
| Date: | 2014–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lev:wrkpap:wp_808&r=all |
| By: | Kuhn, Peter J. (University of California, Santa Barbara); Shen, Kailing (Xiamen University) |
| Abstract: | We study urban Chinese employers' preferences between workers with and without a local residence permit (hukou) using callback information from an Internet job board serving private sector employers. We find that employers prefer migrant workers to locals who are identically matched to the job's requirements; these preferences are especially strong at low skill levels. We argue that migrants' higher work hours and effort help to account for employers' preferences, and present evidence that efficiency wage and intertemporal labor substitution effects might explain these hours/effort gaps. |
| Keywords: | temporary migration, China, hukou, undocumented migrants |
| JEL: | O15 R23 |
| Date: | 2014–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp8289&r=all |
| By: | Nix, Emily; Gamberoni, Elisa; Heath, Rachel |
| Keywords: | Economic Theory&Research,Labor Policies,Income,Gender and Development,Health Systems Development&Reform |
| Date: | 2014–06–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:6946&r=all |
| By: | Zhiling Wang; Thomas de Graaff; and Peter Nijkamp (VU University Amsterdam) |
| Abstract: | This study analyses the impact of cultural composition on regional attractiveness from the perspective of migrant sorting behaviour. We use an attitudinal survey to quantify cultural distances between natives and immigrants in the area concerned, and estimate the migrants’ varying preferences for both cultural diversity and cultural distance. To account for regional unobserved heterogeneity, our econometric analysis employs artificial instrumental variables, as developed by Bayer et al. (2004). The main conclusions are twofold. On the one hand, cultural diversity increases regional attractiveness. On the other hand, average cultural distance greatly weakens regional attractiveness, even when the presence of network effect is controlled for. |
| Keywords: | migration, cultural diversity, cultural distance, destination choice, sorting |
| JEL: | R2 Z1 |
| Date: | 2014–06–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dgr:uvatin:20140066&r=all |