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on Unemployment, Inequality and Poverty |
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Issue of 2014‒11‒22
six papers chosen by |
| By: | Andrew E. Clark; Sarah Flèche; Claudia Senik |
| Abstract: | In spite of the great U-turn that saw income inequality rise in Western countries in the 1980s, happiness inequality has fallen in countries that have experienced income growth (but not in those that did not). Modern growth has reduced the share of both the "very unhappy" and the "perfectly happy". Lower happiness inequality is found both between and within countries, and between and within individuals. Our cross-country regression results argue that the extension of various public goods helps to explain this greater happiness homogeneity. This new stylised fact arguably comes as a bonus to the Easterlin paradox, offering a somewhat brighter perspective for developing countries. |
| Keywords: | Happiness, inequality, economic growth, development, Easterlin paradox |
| JEL: | D31 D6 I3 O15 |
| Date: | 2014–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1306&r=ltv |
| By: | Bertrand, Marianne (Chicago Booth School of Business); Black, Sandra E. (The University of Texas at Austin); Jensen, Sissel (Dept. of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration); Lleras-Muney, Adriana (UCLA) |
| 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 discernible impact on women in business beyond its direct effect on the newly appointed female board members. |
| Keywords: | Gender discrimination; board of directors. |
| JEL: | J01 J13 |
| Date: | 2014–08–29 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:nhheco:2014_028&r=ltv |
| By: | Elizabeth Ananat (Duke University); Shihe Fu (Wang Yanan Institute for Studies in Economics (WISE) Xiamen University); Stephen L. Ross (University of Connecticut) |
| Abstract: | We demonstrate a striking but previously unnoticed relationship between city size and the black-white wage gap, with the gap increasing by 2.5% for every million-person increase in urban population. We then look within cities and document that wages of blacks rise less with agglomeration in the workplace location, measured as employment density per square kilometer, than do white wages. This pattern holds even though our method allows for non-parametric controls for the effects of age, education, and other demographics on wages, for unobserved worker skill as proxied by residential location, and for the return to agglomeration to vary across those demographics, industry, occupation and metropolitan areas. We find that an individual’s wage return to employment density rises with the share of workers in their work location who are of their own race. We observe similar patterns for human capital externalities as measured by share workers with a college education. We also find parallel results for firm productivity by employment density and share college-educated using firm racial composition in a sample of manufacturing firms. These findings are consistent with the possibility that blacks, and black-majority firms, receive lower returns to agglomeration because such returns operate within race, and blacks have fewer same-race peers and fewer highly-educated same-race peers at work from whom to enjoy spillovers than do whites. Data on self-reported social networks in the General Social Survey provide further evidence consistent with this mechanism, showing that blacks feel less close to whites than do whites, even when they work exclusively with whites. We conclude that social distance between blacks and whites preventing shared benefits from agglomeration is a significant contributor to overall black-white wage disparities. |
| Keywords: | black-white wage gap, agglomeration, human capital externalities, information networks, total factor productivity |
| JEL: | J15 J24 J31 R23 R32 |
| Date: | 2014–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hka:wpaper:2014-019&r=ltv |
| By: | Vincenzo Carrieri (Università di Salerno, CELPE and HEDG.); Marcello D'Amato (Università di Salerno, CELPE and CSEF); Roberto Zotti (Università di Salerno) |
| Abstract: | We present a dynamic OLG model of educational signaling, inequality and mobility with missing credit markets. Agents are characterized by two sources of unobserved heterogeneity: ability and parental income, consistent with empirical evidence on returns to schooling. Both quantity and quality of human capital evolve endogenously. The model generates a Kuznets inverted-U pattern in skill premia similar to historical US and UK experience. In the first (resp. later) phase the skill premium rises (falls), social returns to education exceed (falls below) private returns: under-investment owing to financial imperfections dominate (are dominated by) over-investment owing to signaling distortions. There always exist Pareto-improving policy interventions reallocating education between poor and rich children. JEL Classification: Tertiary education, Selective test based admission policies; students’ performances; peer effects; quasiexperiment |
| Keywords: | I21; I28; C21 |
| Date: | 2014–11–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sef:csefwp:381&r=ltv |
| By: | Yekaterina Chzhen; Bruno Martorano; Luisa Natali; Sudhanshu Handa; Goran Holmqvist; UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre |
| Abstract: | This paper reports on how children have fared during the period of the global economic crisis (Great Recession) in rich European countries. The authors provide a descriptive overview of the evolution in a series of child well-being indicators over time (2007/8-2012/3 ) in 32 countries (the EU-28 plus Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and Turkey). The focus is on key child and adolescent outcome indicators that are expected to have been affected by the crisis and its related real-economy effects in the short and medium-term, including child monetary poverty and material deprivation, subjective well-being, and transition to adulthood (including education and employment). Countries’ performances are compared and ranked according to the change they experienced in these indicators over the period under analysis. |
| Keywords: | child well-being; economic crisis; european union; labour market; monetary policy; |
| Date: | 2014 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ucf:inwopa:inwopa730&r=ltv |
| By: | Fabio Sabatini (Department of Economics and Law, Sapienza University of Rome (Italy) and Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (LCSR), National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow and Saint Petersburg (Russia)); Francesco Sarracino (Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques du Grand-Duché du Luxembourg (STATEC), Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (LCSR), National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow and Saint Petersburg (Russia)) |
| Abstract: | Studies in the social capital literature have documented two stylised facts: first, a decline in measures of social participation has occurred in many OECD countries. Second, and more recently, the success of social networking sites (SNSs) has resulted in a steep rise in online social participation. Our study adds to this body of research by conducting the first empirical assessment of how online networking affects two economically relevant aspects of social capital, i.e. trust and sociability. We address endogeneity in online networking by exploiting technological characteristics of the pre-existing voice telecommunication infrastructures that exogenously determined the availability of broadband for high-speed Internet. We find that participation in SNSs such as Facebook and Twitter has a positive effect on face-to-face interactions. However, social trust decreases with online interactions. We argue that the rising practice of hate speech may play a crucial role in the destruction of trust |
| Keywords: | Social Participation, Online Networks, Facebook, Social Trust, Social Capital, Broadband, Digital Divide, Hate Speech |
| JEL: | C36 D85 O33 Z1 |
| Date: | 2014–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fem:femwpa:2014.81&r=ltv |