Author: Hanbyul Ryu Publisher: ISBN: 9781085793117 Category : Econometric models Languages : en Pages : 20
Book Description
In the third chapter of my dissertation, I examine the effect of the Zika virus outbreak in Brazil on fertility and female labor market outcomes. The Zika virus outbreak provided strong motivation to delay pregnancy as the Zika virus infection can cause serious birth defects like microcephaly. However, due to the high frequency of unintended pregnancy in developing countries including Brazil, determining whether women indeed delayed pregnancy was not certain. Using the variation of suspected microcephaly cases across states, I find that more suspected microcephaly cases provided incentives for women to delay pregnancy. This trend was more pronounced among younger and more educated women. Despite the fertility decline, my findings provide little evidence that female labor market outcomes were altered by the outbreak of the Zika virus.
Author: Laine Rutledge Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 130
Book Description
This dissertation focuses on labor market issues for women in developing countries. The first chapter investigates adult life outcomes of a child sponsorship program in six developing countries, with particular attention paid to differing outcomes for men and women. Results show positive impacts on total years of education, and primary, secondary, and university school completion. Particularly large impacts are seen for women in areas where baseline female education is low. The second chapter analyzes the return to child sponsorship, and how these returns vary between men and women. We find positive effects of child sponsorship on men’s income, while the positive return to sponsorship for women is limited to increased income due to increased labor market participation. The third chapter studies labor market migration in Brazil. I use individual and firm fixed-effects to examine the return to moving for men and women. The addition of firm fixed effects does not greatly impact the return to moving for men but eliminates the positive returns measured for women when only using individual fixed-effects. This indicates that any promotion and geographical movement that women experience is not reflected in earnings.
Author: Mai Rajeh Publisher: ISBN: 9781085652025 Category : Labor economics Languages : en Pages : 239
Book Description
This dissertation focuses on women's labor market outcomes and their utilization of time. Essay 1 analyzes the degree of Saudi married women's commitment to work and the factors that shape their commitment, given that there is a retention problem of mothers in the Saudi labor force. The share of married women in the total Saudi female labor force has been decreasing (from 67.5 percent in 2014 to 63.7 percent in 2016). The essay follows a mixed-method study, utilizing both quantitative and qualitative approaches. The quantitative part of the study is based on data collected in Jeddah City through questionnaires, which resulted in a sample size of 200 married working women. The qualitative part of the study is based on data derived from 10 interviews with working mothers in Jeddah City. Using an ordered logit model, I observed that Saudi working mothers display a relatively high commitment to work. The study findings provide evidence that education, family financial background, husband's education, and father-in-law education, work factors such as low income, lack of productive jobs, discrimination, and lack of childcare services, and social norms and attitudes towards women's work are the major variables associated with married women's work commitment, which if tackled could increase their retention in the labor force. The results provide empirical evidence on the points raised by the Ministry of Labor and Social Development of Saudi Arabia regarding the areas that must be addressed to increase female retention in the workforce.The second essay investigates the determinants of female labor force participation in Egypt. It mainly focuses on the impact of patriarchy and social conservatism in the family setting. It has been noted by many researchers who study labor market outcomes in Egypt that these outcomes are mainly affected by religion and culture. Cultural factors could be a significant factor that negatively affects female labor force participation. Egypt suffers from very low and stagnant female labor force participation compared to other countries in the Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) region, which I point out is due to in addition to patriarchy that is found in many of these countries, Egypt is much more conservative. Using data from Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey (2012) I measured patriarchal culture using an index variable constructed from variables reflecting whether the woman participates in decision making regarding household purchases, their own purchases and health, and their children's health and schooling decisions, while social conservatism was constructed from variables reflecting whether women need to get permission to go outside the home. Using a probit model, I tested the conditional labor supply model and included demand-side factors, in addition to the cultural variables and found that patriarchy and social conservatism are significantly and negatively associated with women's labor force participation in Egypt. The third essay examines the factors associated with Mongolian men and women time use. Mongolia transitioned from a centrally planned economy to a market-based economy, that increased poverty throughout the country. Despite the low income of the households, female labor force participation was declining in Mongolia. Researchers noted that the heavy burden on women in household and care work has affected their ability to be involved in employment work. This is further exaggerated by the poor economic conditions of the families that prevent them from substituting home-produced goods that heavily depends on their labor. Further, the lack of basic infrastructure lengthens the time women spend in household and care work. Further, labor market participation and the use of time differ based on the region. Thus, this essay examines the relationship between participation and time spent in employment work with household and care work based on Mongolian Time Use data for 2011 for rural and urban subsamples. The study finds that women in Mongolia spend as much as double the time that men spend on housework and care activities. The study also finds that men and women participate in and spend the same amount of time in employment work in rural areas. However, participation in and time performed in employment work are statistically different between men and women in urban areas. Thus, the study focus on urban areas. Using a Probit model to examine the probability of participating in employment work, I observed that higher wealth is associated with a higher probability of women to participate in employment work. Further, using a Tobit model to examine the determinants of time in employment work, I observed that care responsibilities are not significantly associated with women's time in employment work. However, the household work burden is significantly related with women's ability to perform more employment work. The main conclusion of this essay is that improved infrastructure is associated with more time to be devoted by women on employment work. This suggests that access to adequate infrastructure is associated with a reduction in the time spent on household work, which in turn, is associated with an increase in the time spent in employment work. Further, improved economic conditions that increase the ability of households to obtain market substitutes for home-produced goods and services and purchase time-saving appliances reduces time spent in household work, which in turn is associated with an increase in women's ability to perform more employment work.
Author: Anjali Priya Verma Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
This dissertation examines the determinants of disparity in education and labor market outcomes. The first chapter, co-authored with Imelda, examines the impact of clean energy access on adult health and labor supply outcomes by exploiting a nationwide roll-out of clean cooking fuel program in Indonesia. This program led to a large-scale fuel switching, from kerosene, a dirty fuel, to liquid petroleum gas, a cleaner one. Using longitudinal survey data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey and exploiting the staggered structure of the program rollout, we find that access to clean cooking fuel led to a significant improvement in women’s health, particularly among those who spend most of their time indoors doing housework. We also find an increase in women’s work hours, suggesting that access to cleaner fuel can improve women’s health and plausibly their productivity, allowing them to supply more market labor. For men, we find an increase in the work hours and propensity to have an additional job, mainly in households where women accrued the largest health and labor benefits from the program. These results highlight the role of clean energy in reducing gender disparity in health and point to the existence of positive externalities from the improved health of women on other members of the household. The second paper studies the labor supply response of women to changes in expected alimony income. Using an alimony law change in the US that significantly reduced the post-divorce alimony support among women, I first show that this led to an increase in divorce probability. Second, consistent with the theoretical prediction from a simple model of labor supply, the reform led to an increase in the female labor force participation, with a larger increase among ever-married and more educated samples of women. As a result, the average female wage income increased after the reform. While labor supply increased, I show that most of this increase was concentrated in part-time employment, which may not be sufficient to compensate for the expected loss in alimony income. In light of the recent movement in the US to reform alimony laws, these findings are pertinent to understand its implications on women’s labor supply and economic well-being. The third chapter, co-authored with Akiva Yonah Meiselman, studies the long-run effects of disruptive peers in disciplinary schools on educational and labor market outcomes of students placed at these institutions. Students placed at disciplinary schools tend to have significantly worse future outcomes. We provide evidence that the composition of peers at these institutions plays an important role in explaining this link. We use rich administrative data of high school students in Texas which provides a detailed record of each student’s disciplinary placements, including their exact date of placement and assignment duration. This allows us to identify the relevant peers for each student based on their overlap at the institution. We leverage within school-year variation in peer composition at each institution to ask whether a student who overlaps with particularly disruptive peers has worse subsequent outcomes. We show that exposure to peers in highest quintile of disruptiveness relative to lowest quintile when placed at a disciplinary school increases students’ subsequent removals, reduces their educational attainment, and worsens labor market outcomes. Moreover, these effects are stronger when students have a similar peer group in terms of the reason for removal, or when the distribution of disruptiveness among peers is more concentrated than dispersed around the mean. Our findings draw attention to an unintended consequence of student removal to disciplinary schools, and highlights how brief exposures to disruptive peers can affect an individual’s long-run trajectories
Author: Maria Antonia Vidal Fernández Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 246
Book Description
Abstract: This dissertation evaluates policy-relevant issues in labor and education in developed and developing countries.The first chapter analyzes the effects on high school graduation and other academic outcomes of academic requirements for participation in high school athletics. I use a simple conceptual framework to illustrate the possible effects of the requirement and derive testable predictions. Then, I combine data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) with data on the rules to test the model's predictions. I find that requiring athletes to pass one additional course increased the overall likelihood of graduation among boys by two percentage points but did not affect female students, who at the time had limited access to interscholastic competition. The second chapter (with Josefina Posadas) examines the role of grandparents' child-care provision on mothers' labor market participation. Using the NLSY79 and data from eleven European countries (SHARE), we find significant differences in characteristics of families who rely on this form of child care. Both ordinary least squares and instrumental variables estimates show that the availability of grandparents' care is linked to an increase in the probability of female labor force participation. The third chapter (with Xavier Gine and Monica Martinez-Bravo) studies the labor supply of Indian boat-owners. It uses daily data on labor force participation and the value of catches to test whether the response of labor supply to increases in wages and income is better explained by the conventional framework of inter-temporal substitution or by reference-dependent preferences. This chapter shows that boat-owners' labor participation depends not only on their expected earnings, but also on their recent earnings, supporting income-reference-dependent preferences models. However, the response to changes in recent income is small relative to the response to changes in expected earnings. Furthermore, the results imply that short-term labor supply models should include recent earnings conditional and recent effort as control variables. Since recent earnings are positively correlated with expected earnings and negatively related to the probability of participation, omitting this variable yields downward-biased elasticity estimates.
Author: Kaveh Majlesi Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 250
Book Description
This dissertation contains three chapters on international trade and investment in children's human capital in developing countries. The first chapter examines the effects of changes in labor market opportunities for women on the bargaining power of women within households and, ultimately, on investment in children's human capital. I show that a positive demand shock for female labor in a woman's age category increases her bargaining power, and this raises investment in the health of girls relative to that of boys within the household. To identify this effect, I exploit the geographic heterogeneity in demand for younger versus older female labor within the Mexican export manufacturing sector and its differential changes across municipalities between 2002 and 2005. I find that a 1 percent increase in labor demand for older (mostly married) women, caused by a demand shock to the export manufacturing sector, raises the share of decisions made by the wife in a household by 1.3 percent and the chance of a daughter being in good health by 1.1 percent. Previous research has shown that school enrollment in developing countries responds to a change in the return to education generated by a change in demand in the export sector, that pays higher wages for a given skill level. In the second chapter of my dissertation, using data from Mexico, I show that the negative effects of a lower return to education are not limited to lower rates of school enrollment. Parents also respond to a decrease in the return to education for children, as a result of an increase in labor market opportunities for very young, unskilled labor in the export sector, by reducing spending on children's education even while they are enrolled at school. This suggests that parents respond along the intensive margin as well as on the extensive margin. Firm level studies offer mixed results on the effect of ex-ante liquidity constraints on firms' export status. The third chapter of my dissertation explores the same matter using a new methodology. I predict that, controlling for the firms' productivity level and given that firms were not exporters in the previous period, a larger appreciation of the real exchange rate should have a larger positive effect on the probability of less-liquidity-constrained firms becoming exporters. I test this prediction using a panel of Mexican manufacturing firms and find robust evidence in its support.
Author: Paula Herrera-Idárraga Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 146
Book Description
1) Informality and Overeducation in the Labor Market of a Developing Country This chapter explores the connection between labor market segmentation in two sectors, a modern protected formal sector and a traditional- unprotected-informal sector, and overeducation in a developing country. Informality is thought to have negative consequences, primarily through poorer working conditions, lack of social security, as well as low levels of productivity throughout the economy. This chapter considers an aspect that has not been previously addressed, namely the fact that informality might also affect the way workers match their actual education with that required performing their job. Using micro-data from Colombia the relationship between overeducation and informality is tested. Empirical results suggest that, once the endogeneity of employment choice has been accounted for, formal male workers are less likely to be overeducated. Interestingly, the propensity of being overeducated among women does not seem to be closely related to the sector choice. 2) Double Penalty in Returns to Education: Informality and Educational Mismatch in the Colombian Labor Market This chapter examines the returns to education taking into consideration the existence of educational mismatches in the formal and informal employment of a developing country. Results show that the returns of surplus, required and deficit years of schooling are different in the two sectors. Moreover, they suggest that these returns vary along the wage distribution, and that the pattern of variation differs for formal and informal workers. In particular, informal workers face not only lower returns to their education, but suffer a second penalty associated with educational mismatches that puts them at a greater disadvantage compare to their formal counterparts. 3) Wage Gaps Across Colombian Regions: The Role of Education and Informality This chapter analyzes the role of education and informality on regional wage differentials. The hypothesis that is put under examination is that apart from the difference in the endowments of human capital across regions, regional heterogeneity in the incidence of informality may be another important source of regional wage inequality. The results for Colombian regions confirm marked differences in wage distributions between regions and that they differ in the endowment of human capital and more importantly in the incidence of informality. Regional heterogeneity in returns to education is especially intense in the upper part of the wage distribution. While heterogeneity in the informal pay penalty throughout the territory is more relevant in the lower part of the wage distribution.
Author: Gail P. Kelly Publisher: SUNY Press ISBN: 9780873956208 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 420
Book Description
Gail Kelly and Carolyn Elliott have assembled the latest and best available scholarship from a range of disciplines to illuminate the determinants, nature, and outcomes of womens education in third World nations. This study focuses on the undereducation of women in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, delving into its causes, changes in female education patterns and the significance of these changes to societies and to womens lives. Articles in this volume lay the foundation for further research by examining womens schooling from the novel perspective that the social and economic outcomes of womens education are shaped by gender-sex systems that subordinate women to men.
Author: Susan L. Averett Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190878266 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 889
Book Description
The transformation of women's lives over the past century is among the most significant and far-reaching of social and economic phenomena, affecting not only women but also their partners, children, and indeed nearly every person on the planet. In developed and developing countries alike, women are acquiring more education, marrying later, having fewer children, and spending a far greater amount of their adult lives in the labor force. Yet, because women remain the primary caregivers of children, issues such as work-life balance and the glass ceiling have given rise to critical policy discussions in the developed world. In developing countries, many women lack access to reproductive technology and are often relegated to jobs in the informal sector, where pay is variable and job security is weak. Considerable occupational segregation and stubborn gender pay gaps persist around the world. The Oxford Handbook of Women and the Economy is the first comprehensive collection of scholarly essays to address these issues using the powerful framework of economics. Each chapter, written by an acknowledged expert or team of experts, reviews the key trends, surveys the relevant economic theory, and summarizes and critiques the empirical research literature. By providing a clear-eyed view of what we know, what we do not know, and what the critical unanswered questions are, this Handbook provides an invaluable and wide-ranging examination of the many changes that have occurred in women's economic lives.
Author: Timothy J. Rooney Publisher: ISBN: Category : Economics Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
This dissertation is composed of three papers, all using natural experiments from developing countries to examine critical issues in the lives of individuals in the developing world. In the first chapter, I combine data from a national high school entrance exam linked to individual tax records in Jamaica to examine the short and long-run impact of several key aspects of secondary education. The second chapter examines the impact of education on short and long-term academic outcomes in the country of Colombia. The final chapter examines the impact political connections play in the provision of public amenities in China. The first chapter, "High School Never Ends: Secondary School Attributeson Formal Sector Earnings" examines what features of secondary education lead to increased formal sector earnings. Five hundred million children are enrolled in secondary education in developing countries, over five times that in developed nations. However, little is known about what features of secondary education matter the most for short-term academic or long-term labor market outcomes in developing countries. In this paper, I combine data from a national high school entrance exam linked to individual tax records in Jamaica to examine several key aspects of secondary education. First, the eligibility cutoff in Jamaica allows me to employ a regression discontinuity design to estimate credible causal effects of access to a school with additional years of secondary education. Second, through a similar design, I am able to obtain a credible causal estimate of peer quality on short and long-term outcomes. Finally, using idiosyncratic variation in gender composition, I am able to analyze a school's gender composition on short and long-term outcomes. Access to a school with additional years of education increases formal sector earnings by 2,900 USD PPP per year from ages 22 to 31. However, I find no short or long-term effects from higher quality peers. Finally, I find large academic benefits from having a larger share of same-sex peers but no long-term labor market benefits. The second chapter, "What is the Impact of Educational Spending on Short and Long Term Outcomes? Evidence from Colombia" examines the impact of both lower and higher local education spending on short-term and long-term academic outcomes. The goal of the chapter is to answer the question, "does education spending impact student outcomes in developing countries?" I leverage two separate natural experiments to answer the question. First, I exploit the repeal of a program in Colombia that allocated a portion of oil royalties to per capita education spending in the municipalities where the oil was extracted. Using a rich administrative data set containing more than 1.2 million students, I estimate that a 25 percent drop in education spending results in a 0.05 standard deviation decline in language standardized test scores and a 0.04 standard deviation decline in math standardized test scores. I document that children impacted by the spending cuts are 2.5 percentage points less likely to graduate from a university (8 percent relative to the mean). Moreover, I find the most severe learning losses for women, low-income individuals, and those with less-educated parents. Second, I utilize the institutional feature before the reform linking local education expenditure to oil royalties. I then instrument education expenditure with international oil prices interacting with fixed oil production. I find short-term educational spending increases lead to a rise in the number of students finishing high school and improvements in language scores. The third chapter, "What is the impact of political connections on the provision of public amenities? Evidence from China's primary land markets," measures the effect of political connections on the provision of public amenities. My coauthor (Jing Feng) and I use over two million land transactions from China's primary land market during the period 2001 to 2019. Using a spatially matched sample, we find that connected firms are nearly two percentage points (30 percent) more likely to receive a kindergarten, elementary, or middle school in the immediate vicinity of their purchase. We find suggestive evidence of firms receiving more doctor's offices and hospitals. We then exploit the timing of an anti-corruption crackdown in China; we find the benefits of political connections disappear following the crackdown.
Author: Hanbyul Ryu
Author: Laine Rutledge
Author: Mai Rajeh
Author: Anjali Priya Verma
Author: Maria Antonia Vidal Fernández
Author: Kaveh Majlesi
Author: Paula Herrera-Idárraga
Author: Gail P. Kelly
Author: Susan L. Averett
Author: Timothy J. Rooney