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on Demographic Economics |
| By: | Hielke Buddelmeyer; Daniel S. Hamermesh; Mark Wooden |
| Abstract: | We use longitudinal data describing couples in Australia from 2001-12 and Germany from 2002-12 to examine how demographic events affect perceived time and financial stress. Consistent with the view of measures of stress as proxies for the Lagrangean multipliers in models of household production, we show that births increase time stress, especially among mothers, and that the effects last at least several years. Births generally also raise financial stress slightly. The monetary equivalent of the costs of the extra time stress is very large. While the departure of a child from the home reduces parents’ time stress, its negative impacts on the tightness of the time constraints are much smaller than the positive impacts of a birth. |
| JEL: | I31 J12 J13 |
| Date: | 2015–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:21223&r=dem |
| By: | Sergi Jiménez-Martín; Judit Vall; Elena del Rey |
| Abstract: | In this paper we explore the effects of a labor market reform that changed the statutory minimum working age in Spain in 1980. In particular, the reform raised the statutory minimum working age from 14 to 16 years old, while the minimum age for attaining compulsory education was kept at 14 until 1990. To study the effects of this change, we exploit the different incentives faced by individuals born at various times of the year before and after the reform. We show that, for individuals born at the beginning of the year, the probabilities of finishing both the compulsory and the post-compulsory education level increased after the reform. In addition, we find that the reform decreases mortality while young (16-25) for both genders while it increases mortality for middle age women (26-40). We provide evidence to proof that the latter increase is partly explained by the deterioration of the health habits of affected women. Together, these results help explain the closing age gap in life expectancy between women and men in Spain. |
| Date: | 2015–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fda:fdaddt:2015-07&r=dem |
| By: | Nadir Altinok; Abdurrahman Aydemir |
| Abstract: | The gender gap in education against females becomes smaller as the level of development increases and turns in their favor in developed countries. Through analysis of regional variation in the gender gap within Turkey, which displays a similar pattern to the crosscountry pattern, this paper studies the factors that lead to the emergence of a gender gap against females. The data for student achievement and aspirations for further education during compulsory school show that females are just as well prepared and motivated for further education as their male counterparts across regions with very different levels of development. Despite this fact, large gaps arise in high school registration and completion in less developed regions, but not in developed ones. We find that larger sibship size is the main driver of gender gaps in less developed regions. While social norms have a negative influence on female education beyond compulsory school, they play a relatively small role in the emergence of gender gaps. These results are consistent with the fact that resource-constrained families give priority to males for further education, leading to the emergence of education gender gaps. |
| Keywords: | gender gap, education, achievement, social norms. |
| JEL: | I2 |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ulp:sbbeta:2015-13&r=dem |
| By: | Jo Blanden; Emilia Del Bono; Sandra McNally; Birgitta Rabe |
| Abstract: | This paper studies the effect of free pre-school education on child outcomes in primary school. We exploit the staggered implementation of free part-time pre-school for three-year-olds across Local Education Authorities in England in the early 2000s. The policy led to small improvements in attainment at age five, with no apparent benefits by age 11. We argue that this is because the expansion of free places largely crowded out privately paid care, with small changes in total participation, and was achieved through an increase in private provision, where quality is lower on average than in the public sector. |
| Keywords: | Childcare, child outcomes, publicly provided goods |
| JEL: | I21 I24 H44 |
| Date: | 2015–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1352&r=dem |
| By: | Raab, Roman |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the application of the gap concept to determine pension wealth differentials across different retirement arrangements and over a range of retirement ages. The gap concept allows for comparisons of equality outcomes without having to rely on the optimal savings paradigm. The micro simulation analysis draws a clear picture of inequalities generated by a pension system as opposed to other sources of inequality within the generation in retirement. |
| Keywords: | Personal Income, Wealth, and Their Distributions; Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement; Retirement and Retirement Policies |
| JEL: | D31 D63 J26 |
| Date: | 2015–05–15 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:64762&r=dem |
| By: | Nathaniel G. Hilger |
| Abstract: | Tax records indicate that intergenerational mobility (IM) has been stable for cohorts entering the labor market since the 1990s. I show that when using educational attainment as a proxy for adult income, stable IM is a new phenomenon: IM rose significantly for cohorts entering the labor market from 1940 to 1980. I measure IM directly in historical Census data for children still living with their parents at ages 22-25, and indirectly for other children using an imputation procedure that I validate in multiple data sets with parent-child links spanning the full 1940-2000 period. Post-war mobility gains were larger in the South and for blacks, and were driven by gains in high school rather than college enrollment. Controlling for region and year, states with higher IM have had lower income inequality, higher income levels, more educational inputs, higher minimum dropout ages, and lower teen birth rates. IM gains plausibly increased aggregate annual earnings growth by 0.125-0.25 percentage points over the 1940-1980 period. |
| JEL: | J1 J24 J62 N01 N3 O15 |
| Date: | 2015–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:21217&r=dem |
| By: | Leonardo Gasparini (CEDLAS-UNLP and CONICET); Mariana Marchionni (CEDLAS-UNLP and CONICET); Nicolás Badaracco (CEDLAS-UNLP); Joaquín Serrano (CEDLAS-UNLP and CONICET) |
| Abstract: | This paper documents changes in female labor force participation (LFP) in Latin America exploiting a large database of microdata from household surveys of 15 countries in the period 1992-2012. We find evidence for a significant deceleration in the rate of increase of female LFP in the 2000s, breaking the marked increasing pattern that characterized the region for at least 50 years. The paper documents and characterizes this fact and examines various factors that could be driving the deceleration. Through a set of simple decompositions the paper helps to disentangle whether the patterns in female LFP are mainly accounted for by changes in the distribution of some direct determinants of the labor supply decision (e.g. education), or instead they are chiefly the consequence of some more profound transformation in behavior. |
| JEL: | J2 J1 |
| Date: | 2015–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dls:wpaper:0181&r=dem |
| By: | HORI Masahiro; MITSUYAMA Nahoko; SHIMIZUTANI Satoshi |
| Abstract: | This paper examines intra-household allocation of resources to gain insight into family relationships and gender bias in Japanese household expenditures. We take the Engel curve approach to examine how adult consumption is affected by the presence of a child, either a boy or a girl, in the family. Empowered by diary-based high quality spending data from the Family Income and Expenditure Survey, our empirical results show that adult consumption is significantly reduced in households with children; further, there is no evidence of gender discrimination between boys and girls in terms of the outlay equivalent ratios representing a reduction of the total amount of expenditure for adult goods, while responses of adult clothing expenses to the presence of a child are different between the case of a boy and that of a girl: spending on a father’s clothing is reduced when the child is a school-age daughter, while spending on a mother’s clothing decreases when a school-age son is in the home. Our analysis also shows that girls receive a larger share of spending for children’s clothing as well as for high school education than boys in recent years. Key words: Intra-household resource allocation, Family relationships, Gender bias, Japan. JEL Classification Codes: J16; D12; D13. |
| Date: | 2015–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:esj:esridp:321&r=dem |
| By: | Pinkston, Joshua |
| Abstract: | This paper considers effects of body mass on wages in the years following labor market entry. The preferred models allow current wages to be affected by both past and current body mass, as well as past wages, while also addressing the endogeneity of body mass. I find that a history of severe obesity has a large negative effect on the wages of white men. White women face a penalty for a history of being overweight, with additional penalties for both past and current BMI that begin above the threshold for severe obesity. Furthermore, the effects of past wages on current wages imply that past body mass has additional, indirect effects on wages, especially for white women. |
| Keywords: | BMI; Obesity; Wages; Discrimination; Dynamic Panel Data Models |
| JEL: | I1 J31 J7 |
| Date: | 2015–05–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:64641&r=dem |
| By: | Jan Marcus; Frauke Peter |
| Abstract: | The economic literature provides vast evidence of how public provision of day care for children below school age increases the labour force participation of mothers. The causal effect of all-day schooling in primary school on maternal supply has been examined less since morning-only schooling is less common in developed countries. The present article summarises the findings of (mostly) economic studies on the impact of all-day schooling (Ganztagsschulen) on maternal employment, with a special focus on Germany. |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:diw:diwrup:67en&r=dem |
| By: | Buser, Thomas (School of Economics); Dreber, Anna (Department of Economics); Mollerstrom, Johanna (Interdisciplinary Center for Economics Science (ICES)) |
| Abstract: | Women are often less willing than men to compete, even in tasks where there is no gender gap in performance. Also, many people experience competitive contexts as stressful and previous research has documented that men and women sometimes react differently to acute stressors. We use two laboratory experiments to investigate whether factors related to stress can help explain the gender gap in competitiveness. Experiment 1 studies whether stress responses (measured with salivary cortisol and through self-assessment) to taking part in a mandatory competition predict individual willingness to participate in a voluntary competition. We find that while the mandatory competition does increase stress levels, there is no gender difference in this reaction. Cortisol response does not predict willingness to compete for men but is positively and significantly correlated with choosing to enter the voluntary competition for women. In Experiment 2 we exogenously induce stress using the cold-pressor task. We find no causal effect of stress on competitiveness for the sample as a whole and only tentative evidence of a positive effect for women. In summary, even though there are some gender differences in the relation between stress responses and the decision to enter a competition or not, these cannot explain the general gender gap in willingness to compete that is generally found in the literature and which we replicate. |
| Keywords: | Gender differences; Competitiveness; Experiment; Cortisol; Stress |
| JEL: | C90 C91 J16 J71 |
| Date: | 2015–06–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:1071&r=dem |