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on Demographic Economics |
| By: | Elisabetta Lodigiani (Department of Economics, University Of Venice Cà Foscari); Sara Salomone (IRES, Université catholique de Louvain) |
| Abstract: | This paper empirically investigates the effect of transnational migrants on gender equality in the country of origin measured by the share of women enrolled in the lower chamber of National Parliaments. We test for a ‘migration-induced transfer of norm’ using panel data from 1960 to 2010 in ten-year intervals. Total international migration has a significant effect on female political empowerment in countries of origin conditional on the initial female parliamentary participation in both origin and destination countries. Reverse causality issues are taken into account and results are tested under specific geo-political and temporal subsamples. |
| Keywords: | International Migration, Gender Discrimination, Panel Data, Endogeneity |
| JEL: | F22 J16 D72 C33 |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ven:wpaper:2015:19&r=dem |
| By: | Matthew Calver |
| Abstract: | This report has two major goals. The first goal is to assess progress on the gaps in educational attainment and labour market outcomes between 2001 and 2011 and the consequences of any progress (or lack thereof) for the Canadian economy. The second goal is to produce updated estimates of the benefits of eliminating the educational attainment gap. Utilizing projections of the Aboriginal population in 2031 and data from the 2011 National Household survey, we estimate the effects of closing the educational attainment gap on Aboriginal labour market outcomes and national economic performance. We provide breakdowns of the benefits by province, sex, age, Aboriginal identity, registered Indian status, and residence on- and off-reserve. We project that the direct cumulative economic benefits to Canada of closing the educational attainment gap between 2011 and 2031 could be as large as $261 billion. |
| Keywords: | Aboriginal Education, Aboriginal, Education, Education Gap, Metis, Inuit, First Nations, Educational Attainment, Labour Force Participation, Labour Market Outcomes, Canada |
| JEL: | I21 I20 N32 H52 H75 N92 |
| Date: | 2015–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sls:resrep:1503&r=dem |
| By: | Nordman, Christophe Jalil (IRD, DIAL, Paris-Dauphine); Sarr, Leopold (World Bank); Sharma, Smriti (UNU-WIDER) |
| Abstract: | We use a first-hand linked employer-employee dataset representing the formal sector of Bangladesh to explain gender wage gaps by the inclusion of measures of cognitive skills and personality traits. Our results show that while cognitive skills are important in determining mean wages, personality traits have little explanatory power. However, quantile regressions indicate that personality traits do matter in certain parts of the conditional wage distribution, especially for wages of females. Cognitive skills as measured by reading and numeracy also confer different benefits across the wage distribution to females and males respectively. Quantile decompositions indicate that these skills and traits reduce the unexplained gender gap, mainly in the upper parts of the wage distribution. Finally, results suggest that employers place greater consideration on observables such as academic background and prior work experience, and may also make assumptions about the existence of sex-specific skills of their workers, which could then widen the within-firm gender wage gap. |
| Keywords: | gender wage gap, cognitive skills, personality traits, matched worker-firm data, quantile decompositions, Bangladesh |
| JEL: | J16 J24 J31 J71 C21 O12 |
| Date: | 2015–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp9132&r=dem |
| By: | Mohammadi, Ali (CESIS - Centre of Excellence for Science and Innovation Studies, Royal Institute of Technology); Broström, Anders (CESIS - Centre of Excellence for Science and Innovation Studies, Royal Institute of Technology); Franzoni, Chiara (Politecnico di Milano) |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we study how workforce composition is related to firm’s radical innovation. Previous studies have argued that teams composed by individuals with diverse background are able to perform more information processing and make a deeper use of the information, which is important to accomplish complex tasks. We suggest that this argument can be extended to the level of the aggregate workforce of high technology firms. Our theoretical interest is focused on the extent to which insights from the literatures on science and invention can be applied to firms’ abilities to achieve radical innovation. In particular, we argue that having a set of employees with greater ethnical and higher education diversity is associated with superior radical innovation performance. Using a sample of 3,888 Swedish firms, we find that greater workforce ethnic diversity is positively correlated to the share of a firm’s turnover generated by radical innovation, while it is neutral to incremental innovation. Greater diversity in terms of higher educational disciplinary background of the workforce is positively correlated to the share of turnover generated by both radical and incremental innovation. Contrary to our hypothesis, we also find that having more external collaborations reduces the importance of a workforce with a diverse disciplinary background, while the importance of ethnic diversity is hold unchanged. Our findings hold after using alternatives measures of dependent and independent variables, alternative sample sizes, and alternative estimation techniques including panel data, and structural equation modeling for simultaneous estimation of diversity, R&D intensity and external search. |
| Keywords: | Ethnic diversity; Education diversity; External search; Radical innovation |
| JEL: | J15 J24 J61 O32 |
| Date: | 2015–06–29 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:cesisp:0413&r=dem |
| By: | Xin Meng (Research School of Economics, CBE, Australian National University); Chikako Yamauchi (GRIPS) |
| Abstract: | In the past 15 years, around 160 million Chinese rural workers migrated to cities for work. Because of restrictions on migrant access to local health and education system, many migrant children are left-behind in rural villages and growing up without parental care. This paper examines how parental migration affects children's health and education outcomes in the long run. Using the Rural-Urban Migration Survey in China (RUMiC) data, we measure the share of children's lifetime during which parents were away from home. We instrument this measure of parental absence with weather changes in their home villages when parents were aged 16-25, or when they were most likely to initiate migration. Results show a sizable adverse impact of exposure to parental migration on the health and education outcomes of children, in particular boys. We also find that what the literature has always done (using contemporaneous measure for parental migration) is likely to underestimate the effect of exposure to parental migration on children's outcomes. |
| Date: | 2015–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ngi:dpaper:15-07&r=dem |