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on Demographic Economics |
| By: | Nezih Guner (CEMFI); Yuliya A. Kulikova (Banco de España); Arnau Valladares-Esteban (University of St. Gallen and Sew) |
| Abstract: | The added worker effect (AWE) measures the entry of individuals into the labor force due to their partners’ adverse labor market outcomes. We propose a new method to calculate the AWE that allows us to estimate its effect on any labor market outcome. The AWE reduces the fraction of households with two non-employed members by 16% for the 1977-2018 period; 28% in the 1990 recession and 23% during the great recession. The AWE also accounts for why women’s employment is much less cyclical and more symmetric than men’s. Without the AWE, married women’s employment would be as volatile as men and display negative skewness (declining quickly in recessions and recovering slowly in expansions). In recessions, while some women lose their employment, others enter the labor market and find jobs. This keeps female employment relatively stable. |
| Keywords: | added worker effect, household labor supply, intra-household insurance, female employment, cyclicality, skewness |
| JEL: | D1 E32 J21 J22 |
| Date: | 2021–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bde:wpaper:2113&r=all |
| By: | Francesca Carta; Francesco D'Amuri; Till M. von Wachter |
| Abstract: | This paper quantifies the effect of a policy-induced sharp increase in retirement ages on input mix and economic outcomes of firms using Italian matched worker-firm data. Data on lifetime pension contributions are used to calculate the expected additional number of older workers employed by each firm due to the reform. Resulting instrumental variable estimates show an increase in older workers leads to a precisely estimated rise in employment of younger workers, value added, and total labor costs at constant labor productivity and unit labor costs. The findings suggest rising institutional retirement ages can help firms to retain valuable older employees. |
| JEL: | H55 J23 J26 |
| Date: | 2021–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:28407&r=all |
| By: | Nezih Guner (CEMFI, Centro de Estudios Monetarios y Financieros); Ezgi Kaya (Cardiff Business School); Virginia Sánchez Marcos (Universidad de Cantabria) |
| Abstract: | The total fertility rate is well below its replacement level of 2.1 children in high-income countries. Why do women choose such low fertility levels? We study how labor market frictions affect the fertility of college-educated women. We focus on two frictions: uncertainty created by dual labor markets (the coexistence of jobs with temporary and open-ended contracts) and inflexibility of work schedules. Using rich administrative data from the Spanish Social Security records, we show that women are less likely to be promoted to permanent jobs than men. Temporary contracts are also associated with a lower probability of first birth. With Time Use data, we also show that women with children are less likely to work in jobs with split-shift schedules, which come with a fixed time cost. We then build a life-cycle model in which married women decide whether to work or not, how many children to have, and when to have them. In the model, women face a trade-off between having children early and waiting and building their careers. We show that reforms that reduce the labor market duality and eliminate split-shift schedules increase the completed fertility of college-educated from 1.52 to 1.88. These reforms enable women to have more children and have them early in their life-cycle. They also increase the labor force participation of women and eliminate the employment gap between mothers and non-mothers. |
| Keywords: | Fertility, labor market frictions, temporary contracts, split-shift schedules. |
| JEL: | E24 J13 J21 J22 |
| Date: | 2019–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cmf:wpaper:wp2019_1913&r=all |
| By: | Joseph G. Altonji; Disa M. Hynsjo; Ivan Vidangos |
| Abstract: | We examine what determines the family income that men and women experience over their adult lives. To this end, we estimate a dynamic model of earnings, nonlabor income, fertility, marriage, and divorce. We use the model to address a number of important questions in labor and family economics, including the effects of education and unobserved permanent characteristics on marital status and on spouse characteristics conditional on marriage. We estimate the dynamic response of wage rates, work hours, earnings, marriage and spouse characteristics and family income to various shocks. Marital status has a much larger effect on family income for women than men, while labor market shocks to men are more important than shocks to women. Marital sorting plays a major role in the return to education and permanent wages, especially for women. We use the model to provide gender-specific estimates of the contribution of education, permanent wages, labor market shocks, spouse characteristics, and marital histories to the variance of family income at a given age and over a lifetime. |
| JEL: | D1 D31 J01 J10 J12 J16 J31 |
| Date: | 2021–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:28400&r=all |
| By: | Elena Grinza; Francesco Devicienti; Mariacristina Rossi; Davide Vannoni |
| Abstract: | The attitudes of people about how paid and unpaid work should be divided between the members of a couple (gender role attitudes) determine the economic and social outcomes of women to a great extent. It is thus important to understand how the gender role attitudes of people are formed and evolve. In this paper, we concentrate on one of the most path breaking events in life: becoming a parent. Using rich longitudinal data from the UK and fixed-effects regressions, we first show that, in general, entry into parenthood significantly shifts the gender role attitudes of women toward more traditional positions, but leaves men unaffected. We then show that prenatal attitudes are crucial in driving the change in attitudes of new parents. We find a substantial traditionalization of gender role attitudes for new parents who had more progressive prenatal attitudes, with no distinction between the sexes. Conversely, no significant attitude change is observed for parents with more conservative prenatal attitudes after entering into parenthood. Novel moderating analyses also show that the traditionalization of attitudes for progressive individuals, after they become parents, becomes substantially stronger as the experience of (and exposure to) traditional postnatal arrangements in the division of paid and unpaid work increases. |
| Keywords: | Gender role attitudes, entry into parenthood, gender identity, cognitive dissonance, gendered institutions and gender stereotypes, Understanding Society data set. |
| JEL: | J16 J13 D02 |
| Date: | 2020 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cca:wpaper:635&r=all |
| By: | Cavapozzi, Danilo (Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia); Francesconi, Marco (University of Essex); Nicoletti, Cheti (University of York) |
| Abstract: | We study whether mothers' labor supply is shaped by the gender role attitudes of their peers. Using detailed information on a sample of UK mothers with dependent children, we find that having peers with gender-egalitarian norms leads mothers to be more likely to have a paid job and to have a greater share of the total number of paid hours worked within their household, but has no sizable effect on hours worked. Most of these effects are driven by less educated women. A new decomposition analysis allows us to estimate that approximately half of the impact on labor force participation is due to women conforming gender role attitudes to their peers', with the remaining half being explained by the spillover effect of peers' labor market behavior. These findings suggest that an evolution towards gender-egalitarian attitudes promotes gender convergence in labor market outcomes. In turn, a careful dissemination of statistics on female labor market behavior and attitudes may accelerate this convergence. |
| Keywords: | culture, norms, gender, identity, peer effects |
| JEL: | J12 J16 J22 J24 J31 Z13 |
| Date: | 2021–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp14219&r=all |
| By: | Giuntella, Osea (University of Pittsburgh); Rotunno, Lorenzo (Aix-Marseille University); Stella, Luca (Catholic University Milan) |
| Abstract: | Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we analyze the effects of exposure to trade on the fertility and marital behavior of German workers. We find that individuals working in sectors that were more affected by import competition from Eastern Europe and suffered worse labor market outcomes were less likely to have children. In contrast, workers in sectors that benefited from increased exports had better employment prospects and higher fertility. These effects are driven by low-educated and married men, and reflect changes in the likelihood of having any child (extensive margin). While among workers exposed to import competition there is evidence of some fertility postponement, we find a significant reduction of completed fertility. There is instead little evidence of any significant effect on marital behavior. |
| Keywords: | international trade, labor market outcomes, fertility, marriage |
| JEL: | F14 F16 J13 |
| Date: | 2021–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp14224&r=all |
| By: | Adam A. Leive; Christopher J. Ruhm |
| Abstract: | We examine gender and race differences in education-mortality trends among 25-64 year olds in the United States from 2001-2018. The data indicate that the relationships are heterogeneous with larger mortality reductions for less educated non-Hispanic blacks than other races and mixed results at higher levels of schooling. We also investigate the causes of death associated with changes in overall mortality rates and identify key differences across race groups and education quartiles. Drug overdoses represent the single most important contributor to increased death rates for all groups, but the sizes of these effects vary sharply. Cardiovascular disease, cancer, and HIV are the most significant sources of mortality rate reductions, with the patterns again heterogeneous across sex, race, and educational attainment. These results suggest the limitations of focusing on all-cause mortality rates when attempting to determine the sources of positive and negative health shocks affecting population subgroups. Examining specific causes of death can provide a more nuanced understanding of these trends. |
| JEL: | I10 I12 I14 I24 J10 |
| Date: | 2021–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:28419&r=all |
| By: | Guinnane, Timothy; Streb, Jochen |
| Abstract: | Economists have long argued that introducing social insurance will reduce fertility. The hypothesis relies on standard models: if children are desirable in part because they provide security in case of disability or old age, then State programs that provide insurance against these events should induce couples to substitute away from children in the allocation of wealth. We test this claim using the introduction of social insurance in Germany in the period 1881-1910. Bismarck's social-insurance scheme had three pillars: health insurance, workplace accident insurance, and an old age pension. Earlier studies typically focus on the pension alone; we consider all three pillars. We find that Bismarck's social insurance system affected fertility overall only via its effects on the incentive to marry. The old age insurance by itself tended to reduce marriages, but the health and accident-insurance components had the opposite effect. For people exposed to all three pillars of social insurance, the two effects cancelled each other and the aggregate effect on fertility was muted. |
| Keywords: | Social insurance,pensions,fertility transition,marriage,Bismarck,Prussia |
| JEL: | H55 I13 J11 N13 N33 N43 |
| Date: | 2021 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:rwirep:901&r=all |
| By: | Jeremy Greenwood (University of Pennsylvania); Nezih Guner (CEMFI, Centro de Estudios Monetarios y Financieros); Karen A. Kopecky (FRB Atlanta) |
| Abstract: | The 19th and 20th centuries saw a transformation in contraceptive technologies and their take up. This led to a sexual revolution, which witnessed a rise in premarital sex and out-of-wedlock births, and a decline in marriage. The impact of contraception on married and single life is analyzed here both theoretically and quantitatively. The analysis is conducted using a model where people search for partners. Upon ?nding one, they can choose between abstinence, marriage, and a premarital sexual relationship. The model is confronted with some stylized facts about premarital sex and marriage over the course of the 20th century. Some economic history is also presented. |
| Keywords: | Age of marriage, contraceptive technology, history, never-married population, number of partners, out-of-wedlock births, premarital sex, singles. |
| Date: | 2019–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cmf:wpaper:wp2019_1912&r=all |
| By: | Bellemare, Charles (Université Laval); Kyui, Natalia (Bank of Canada); Lacroix, Guy (Université Laval) |
| Abstract: | We show that survey and administrative data-based estimates of a panel data model of earnings, employment, and outmigration yield very different qualitative and quantitative predictions. Survey-based estimates substantially overpredict outmigration, in particular for lower performing immigrants. Consequently, employment and earnings of immigrants who remain in the country are overpredicted relative to model predictions from administrative data. Importantly, estimates from both data sources find opposite self-selection mechanisms into outmigration. Differences hold despite using the same cohort, survey period, and observable characteristics. Differences in predictions are driven by difficulties of properly separating non-random sample attrition from selective outmigration in survey data. |
| Keywords: | sample attrition, outmigration, measurement errors, employment and earnings |
| JEL: | C33 J31 J15 J61 |
| Date: | 2021–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp14217&r=all |