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on Minorities Research (Ethnic, LGBTQ+, Disabilities) |
| By: | Richard Blundell; Monica Costa-Dias; Graham Mazeine; Costas Meghir; Tom Waters |
| Abstract: | Work experience has been found to be a key determinant of work and wages for educated women, but it seems to play a smaller role for the less educated. For them, welfare, tax credits and family composition matter more, and increasingly so does participation in disability programmes. Here we document how labor supply, wages, health, and disability claims have evolved in the UK over the last three decades, and examine how reforms to tax credits, disability benefits and other welfare programs have changed work incentives over this period. We then introduce these features into an empirical dynamic structural model of life-cycle labor supply, human capital and disability benefit application, in which human capital combines health capital, experience accumulated in work, and education. Estimating the model on a panel of working-age women in the UK, we examine the interactions between experience capital and health capital in driving life-cycle earnings across different education groups. Our results highlight the importance of interactions in the disability benefit, welfare and tax-credit systems for understanding the life cycle pattern of hours, employment, earnings, and disability claims, and for evaluating policy counterfactuals. |
| JEL: | D15 D31 H24 H31 I14 I3 J14 J22 J31 |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35861 |
| By: | Ran Abramitzky; Jacob Conway; Roy Mill; Luke C. D. Stein |
| Abstract: | We study differences in economic outcomes by perceived skin tone among African Americans using full-count U.S. decennial census data from the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Comparing children coded as "Black" or "Mulatto" by census enumerators and linking these children across population censuses, we first document large gaps in educational attainment and income among African Americans with darker and lighter perceived skin tones. To disentangle the drivers of these gaps, we identify all 35, 992 families in which enumerators assigned same-gender siblings different Black/Mulatto classifications. Relative to sisters coded as Mulatto, sisters coded as Black had lower educational attainment, were less likely to marry, and had less-educated, likely lower-earning husbands. These patterns are consistent with more severe contemporaneous discrimination against African American women with darker perceived skin tones. In contrast, we find similar educational attainment, marital outcomes, and incomes among differently-classified brothers. Men perceived as African Americans of any skin tone faced similar contemporaneous discrimination, consistent with the "one-drop" racial classification rule that grouped together individuals with any known Black ancestry. Lower incomes for African American men perceived as having darker skin tone in the general population were driven by differences in opportunities and resources that varied across families, likely reflecting the impacts of historical or family-level discrimination. |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2610.10606 |
| By: | Ulugbek Aminjonov (Institute for Labour Law and Industrial Relations in the European Union (IAAEU), Trier University); Olivier Bargain (Bordeaux University) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines how combinations of ancestral cultural norms are associated with women’s empowerment across ethnic groups worldwide. Linking Demographic and Health Surveys to ancestral traits from the Ethnographic Atlas, we develop a hybrid supervised– unsupervised approach combining Partial Least Squares with k-means clustering to identify multidimensional normative configurations. We identify five probabilistic regimes spanning the empowerment gradient. Severe disempowerment is associated with an accumulation of restrictive norms, while religious norms and women’s role in agriculture distinguish higherempowerment environments within otherwise broadly patriarchal configurations. Further up the gradient, contrasts concern first hierarchical social institutions, then kinship structures and the loosening of patriarchal arrangements, before less traditional, more gender-neutral configurations become widespread at the highest levels of empowerment. The salience of norms varies with the configurations in which they are embedded, revealing strongly non-monotonic patterns. These findings remain robust to accounting for contemporary socioeconomic conditions and to a range of sensitivity checks. Overall, the analysis provides a global mapping of ancestral normative environments associated with women’s agency and helps identify the configurations most closely related to severe intrahousehold inequality. |
| Keywords: | women’s empowerment, ancestral norms, cultural persistence, kinship systems, machine learning, gender inequality, DHS, Ethnographic Atlas |
| JEL: | J16 O15 Z13 C38 D13 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iaa:dpaper:202607 |
| By: | Guida Ayza Estopà; Bart Cockx; Sébastien Fontenay; Ilan Tojerow |
| Abstract: | This paper studies how financial incentives shape labor supply decisions among disability insurance (DI) recipients who already combine benefits with part-time work. We exploit a distinctive feature of the Belgian Adapted Work Program, in which DI benefits are progressively withdrawn as earnings increase and the marginal withdrawal rate rises sharply at predefined thresholds. Because participants cannot freely adjust their working hours, this setting allows us to estimate how higher implicit taxation affects transitions out of partial work. Using administrative data and a Regression Kink Design, we find that higher implicit tax rates induce exits in two opposite directions: toward full-time employment and back to full DI. A one euro increase in the implicit marginal tax per working day raises the probability of returning to full DI by 3.0 percentage points and of resuming full-time employment by 1.5 percentage points, corresponding to elasticities of 0.84 and 0.85. A simple labor supply framework rationalizes these divergent responses. Our findings show that the financial design of partial-benefit schemes can determine whether partial work serves as a bridge toward full employment or instead leads recipients back to full benefit dependency. |
| Keywords: | disability insurance, return-to-work policies, financial incentives, regression kink design |
| JEL: | I13 I38 J14 J22 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_13041 |
| By: | Dhaval M. Dave; Jooyoung Kim; Joseph J. Sabia |
| Abstract: | Licensure sales requirements are commonly justified as consumer protection regulations intended to improve seller compliance and reduce harm associated with risky products. However, licensure effects may differ across communities with heterogeneous enforcement intensity and seller responses. We study this question in the context of e-cigarette retail licensure laws (ERLLs), a policy intended to regulate access to e-cigarettes among youth. We find that state ERLLs with strong penalties for non-compliance reduce nicotine vaping among Black youths by 2.5-4.0 percentage points but have no effect on White youths. This racially disparate finding is driven by heterogeneous supply-side responses to increased regulatory burden. Vendors in Black neighborhoods are more likely to be targeted for inspections than those in White neighborhoods despite having lower pre-treatment rates of infractions. Moreover, vendors in Black neighborhoods are also less likely to sell e-cigarettes following ERLL adoption, consistent with a racially disparate regulatory burden. Together, our results suggest important distributional consequences of licensure requirements. |
| JEL: | H22 I12 I18 |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35848 |