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on Unemployment, Inequality and Poverty |
| By: | John List; Haruka Uchida |
| Abstract: | An unsettling stylized fact is that decorated early childhood education programs improve cognitive skills in the short-term, but lose their efficacy after a few years. We implement a field experiment with two stages of randomization to explore the underpinnings of the fade-out effect. We first randomly assign preschool access to children, and then partner with the local school district to randomly assign the same children to classmates throughout elementary school. We find that the fade-out effect is critically linked to the share of classroom peers assigned to preschool access-with enough treated peers the classic fade-out effect is muted. Our results highlight a paradoxical insight: while the fade-out effect has been viewed as a devastating critique of early childhood programs, our results highlight that fade-out is a key rational for providing early education to all children. This is because human capital accumulation is inherently a social activity, leading early education programs to deliver their largest benefits at scale when everyone receives such programs. |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:feb:framed:00797 |
| By: | Bryson, Alex (University College London); Morris, Tim (University College London); Bann, David (University College London); Wilkinson, David (University College London) |
| Abstract: | Using two polygenic scores (PGS) for educational attainment in a biomedical study of all those born in a single week in Great Britain in 1958 we show that the genetic predisposition for educational attainment is associated with labour market participation and wages over the life- course for men and women. Those with a higher PGS spend more time in employment and full-time employment and, when in employment, earn higher hourly wages. The employment associations are more pronounced for women than for men. Conditional on employment, the PGS wage associations are sizeable, persistent and similar for men and women between ages 33 and 55. A one standard deviation increase in the PGS is associated with a 6-10 log point increase in hourly earnings. However, whereas a 1 standard deviation increase in the PGS at age 23 raises women's earnings by around 5 log points, it is not statistically significant among men. These associations are robust to non-random selection into employment and to controls for parental education. Our results suggest that genetic endowments of a cohort born a half century ago continued to play a significant role in their fortunes in the labor market of the 21st Century. |
| Keywords: | gender wage gap, employment, educational attainment, polygenic score, National Child Development Study |
| JEL: | I26 J31 J16 J24 |
| Date: | 2024–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp17255 |
| By: | Freak-Poli, Rosanne (Monash University); Jenkins, Stephen P. (London School of Economics); Shields, Michael A. (Monash University); Trinh, Trong-Anh (Monash University) |
| Abstract: | Despite a substantial literature on the links between social relationships and mortality, the size of the relative risks from loneliness, social isolation, and living alone, remain controversial. Further research is therefore important given demographic changes meaning that more people are living alone, for longer, and with chronic health conditions. Using 19 waves of high-quality Australian longitudinal data we provide new evidence using multiple measures of social relationships, model specifications, and adjustments for confounding. We focus on chronic measures of (poor) social relationships and provide separate estimates by gender. We find that both functional and structural aspects of social relationships are independently strongly associated with all-cause mortality. We estimate a hazard ratio for loneliness of 1.41, which is greater for males (1.55) than females (1.24). These hazard ratios are larger than found for social isolation (1.19). We also find a strong relationship between being an active member of a club and reduced mortality risk, but no evidence that living alone is an independent risk factor. We provide useful comparisons with the mortality risks associated with smoking and household income. Overall, our findings suggest that interventions should focus on reducing both loneliness and social isolation, as well as encouraging active social participation. |
| Keywords: | mortality, social relationships, loneliness, social support, social isolation, club membership, living alone, smoking, income, survival analysis |
| JEL: | I14 I18 I31 |
| Date: | 2024–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp17274 |
| By: | David Neumark; Emma Wohl |
| Abstract: | One of the arguments increasingly made to support large minimum wage increases is that they decrease wage or earnings gaps for minorities or women (e.g., Derenoncourt and Montialoux, 2021). The argument is often made with particular reference to higher tipped minimum wages for restaurant workers, because of discrimination in tipping that is immune to equal pay policy requirements. Of course, even if higher tipped minimum wages reduce hourly pay differences between groups, increases in tipped minimum wages can reduce employment or hours among restaurant workers (Neumark and Yen, 2023), and these effects could differ by race and gender, so implications for hourly earnings do not necessarily extend to overall earnings. We estimate the impact of variation in tipped minimum wages – or, equivalently, tip credits – on earnings of restaurant workers (which ignores employment variation but incorporates hours variation). We find that tipped minimum wages raise hourly earnings of women, but not of Blacks or Hispanics. But tipped minimum wages generally do not raise weekly earnings for these groups (because of hours declines for women). In contrast, regular minimum wages boost hourly and weekly earnings of all three groups of restaurant workers, with the effects arising from non-tipped workers. |
| JEL: | J23 J38 |
| Date: | 2024–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32964 |
| By: | Blau, Francine D. (Cornell University); Lynch, Lisa M. (Brandeis University) |
| Abstract: | This paper provides an overview of what has happened over the past fifty years for women as they worked to break through professional barriers in economics, policy, and institutional leadership. We chart the progress of women in higher education at the college level and beyond and then go on to examine women's representation at the upper levels of academia, government, law, medicine, and management. We begin our description of trends in 1972 when Title IX was enacted, prohibiting sex-based discrimination in federally funded educational programs. The data paint a picture of considerable progress but also persistent inequities. We then go on to consider possible explanations for the continuing gender differences and some of the empirical evidence on the factors identified. |
| Keywords: | labor economics, economics of gender, labor force trends, education, discrimination, women leadership |
| JEL: | J0 J01 J10 J16 J2 J21 J24 J7 J70 |
| Date: | 2024–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp17295 |
| By: | Bargain, Olivier; Jara, H. Xavier; Rivera, David |
| Abstract: | To finance increased public spending and social programs, Latin America's tax systems need to develop further. Yet taxation can reduce the tax base by discouraging formal employment. Evidence on the intensity of the problem is limited and tends to focus on specifically large reforms of the tax system. Conversely, and to improve external validity, we study whether routine changes in tax policies also alter labor market formalization. Our approach is based on grouped-data estimations of formal employment responses to policy changes. We exploit tax variation across three countries (Bolivia, Ecuador and Colombia) and three periods (2008, 2014/15, 2019). We use precise calculations of counterfactual tax burdens when moving from informal to formal jobs, i.e. formalization tax rates (FTRs). For most countries and pairs of years, FTRs have a negative and significant effect on formal employment, particularly when wages are held constant across periods – in order to extract the pure policy effect – and in a series of sensitivity checks. |
| Keywords: | taxation; benefits; labor supply; informality |
| JEL: | H24 H31 J24 J40 |
| Date: | 2024–09–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:125368 |