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on Unemployment, Inequality and Poverty |
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Issue of 2022‒12‒05
five papers chosen by |
| By: | Clark, Andrew E. (Paris School of Economics); D'Ambrosio, Conchita (University of Luxembourg); Lepinteur, Anthony (University of Luxembourg) |
| Abstract: | Job insecurity is one of the risks that workers face on the labour market. As with any risk, individuals can choose to insure against it, and we here consider marriage as one potential source of this insurance. The 1999 rise in the French Delalande tax, paid by larger private firms when they laid off workers aged 50 or over, led to an exogenous rise in job insecurity for the uncovered (younger workers) in these larger firms. A difference-in-differences analysis using French panel data reveals that this greater job insecurity for the under-50s led to a significant rise in their probability of marriage, and especially when the partner had greater job security, consistent with marriage providing insurance against labour-market risk. |
| Keywords: | marriage, insurance, employment protection, difference-in-differences |
| JEL: | I38 J13 J18 |
| Date: | 2022–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp15654&r=ltv |
| By: | Lepinteur, Anthony (University of Luxembourg); Clark, Andrew E. (Paris School of Economics); Ferrer-i-Carbonell, Ada (IAE Barcelona (CSIC)); Piper, Alan (University of Leeds); Schröder, Carsten (DIW Berlin); D'Ambrosio, Conchita (University of Luxembourg) |
| Abstract: | We analyse a measure of loneliness from a representative sample of German individuals interviewed in both 2017 and at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Both men and women felt lonelier during the COVID-19 pandemic than they did in 2017. The pandemic more than doubled the gender loneliness gap: women were lonelier than men in 2017, and the 2017-2020 rise in loneliness was far larger for women. This rise is mirrored in life-satisfaction scores. Men's life satisfaction changed only little between 2017 and 2020; yet that of women fell dramatically, and sufficiently so to produce a female penalty in life satisfaction. We estimate that almost all of this female penalty is explained by the disproportionate rise in loneliness for women during the COVID-19 pandemic. |
| Keywords: | loneliness, life satisfaction, gender, COVID-19, SOEP |
| JEL: | I10 I14 I18 I30 |
| Date: | 2022–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp15653&r=ltv |
| By: | García, Jorge Luis (Clemson University); Heckman, James J. (University of Chicago) |
| Abstract: | This paper compares early childhood enrichment programs that promote social mobility for disadvantaged children within and across generations. Instead of conducting a standard meta-analysis, we present a harmonized primary data analysis of programs that shape current policy. Our analysis is a template for rigorous syntheses and comparisons across programs. We analyze new long-run life-cycle data collected for iconic programs when participants are middle-aged and their children are in their twenties. The iconic programs are omnibus in nature and offer many services to children and their parents. We compare them with relatively low-cost more focused home-visiting programs. Successful interventions target both children and their caregivers. They engage caregivers and improve the home lives of children. They permanently boost cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Participants in programs that enrich home environments grow up with better skills, jobs, earnings, marital stability, and health, as well as reduced participation in crime. Long-run monetized gains are substantially greater than program costs for iconic programs. We investigate the mechanisms promoting successful family lives for participants and find intergenerational effects on their children. A study of focused home-visiting programs that target parents enables us to isolate a crucial component of successful programs: they activate and promote parenting skills of child caregivers. The home-visiting programs we analyze produce outcomes comparable to those of the iconic omnibus programs. National implementation of the programs with long-run follow up that we analyze would substantially shrink the overall US Black-White earnings gap. |
| Keywords: | skills, social mobility, inequality, human development |
| JEL: | J18 J13 J24 J31 D13 |
| Date: | 2022–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp15672&r=ltv |
| By: | Alpaslan AKAY; Olivier BARGAIN; H. Xavier JARA |
| Abstract: | Subjective well-being (SWB) data is increasingly used to perform welfare analysis. Interpreted as ‘experienced utility’, it has recently been compared to ‘decision utility’ using small-scale experiments most often based on stated preferences. We transpose this comparison to the framework of non-experimental and large-scale data commonly used for policy analysis, focusing on the income-leisure domain where redistributive policies operate. Using the British Household Panel Survey, we suggest a ‘deviation’ measure, which is simply the difference between actual working hours and SWB-maximizing hours. We show that about three-quarters of individuals make decisions that are not inconsistent with maximizing their SWB. We discuss the potential channels that explain the lack of optimization when deviations are significantly large. We find proxies for a number of individual and external constraints, and show that constraints alone can explain at least half of the deviations. In our context, deviations partly reflect the inability of the revealed preference approach to account for labor market rigidities, so the actual and SWB-maximizing hours should be used in a complementary manner. The suggested approach based on our deviation metric could help identify labor market frictions. |
| Keywords: | Decision Utility, Experienced Utility, Labor Supply, Subjective Well-Being |
| JEL: | C90 I31 J22 |
| Date: | 2022 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:grt:bdxewp:2022-23&r=ltv |
| By: | Olivier BARGAIN; Maria C. LO BUE; Flaviana PALMISANO |
| Abstract: | We suggest a simple and fexible criterion to assess relative inter-generational mobility. It accommodates different types of outcomes, such as (continuous) earnings or (discrete and ordinal) education levels, and captures dynastic improvements of such outcomes at different points of the initial distribution. We provide dominance characterizations - for instance on the relative progress made by women vs. men - that are consistent with social preferences upon desirable patterns of mobility. We suggest an application on Indonesia. Using the IFLS data, we match parents observed in 1993 to their children in 2014, providing one of the rare intergenerational mobility analyses based on a long panel in the context of a developing country. Results indicate that mobility in terms of education and potential earnings was markedly at the advantage of women. The bulk of the population came out of illiteracy, possibly due to largescale education reforms, but the relative educational mobility was regressive, which considerably reduced the progressivity of mobility in terms of potential earnings. |
| Keywords: | intergenerational mobility, education, earnings, social welfare, gender |
| JEL: | J6 J62 O12 |
| Date: | 2022 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:grt:bdxewp:2022-21&r=ltv |