Educational Attainment and the Lesbian Wage Premium

This paper provides insight into the wage gap between lesbians and heterosexual women. Using data from the 2000 Decennial Census, we find a lesbian premium that equals approximately 10% for women without a bachelor’s degree, and is nearly non-existent for women with higher levels of education. These findings are consistent with proposition that the gap between lesbians’ and heterosexual women’s commitment to the labor market narrows at higher levels of education. We also find that controls for industry and occupation exert only a small effect on the gap between lesbian and heterosexual women’s wages.

The working spouse penalty/premium and married women’s labor supply

Using data drawn from the Current Population Surveys, this paper provides a consistent explanation for why the presence of a working wife reduces the husband’s wage among managers, but increases the husband’s wage among non-managers. It is not husband’s occupation per se but rather the distribution of husbands’ wage levels that underlies the working spouse penalty or premium. Positive correlations in earnings between married couples that arise from assortative mating make the cross-wage effects of the husbands’ wages on the wives’ hours of work first positive, then negative in cross-sectional data. The phenomenon of a working spouse penalty/premium is simply the flip side of this relationship.

Do Professional Sports Unions Fit the Standard Model of Traditional Unionism?

Current literature generally highlights the unique differences between sports and traditional unions. In particular, the contrast between the two types of unions’ approaches to the free market when it comes to wage determination—sports unions fought the “reserve clause” to obtain free market outcomes while traditional unions fought to circumvent the market for wages—has been widely cited. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the hitherto neglected comparisons between sports and traditional unions. With respect to both economic and non-economic issues, professional sports unions share far more in common with their traditional counterparts than the labor and sports economics literatures would lead one to believe.

The Impact of Privatization on the Earnings of Restructured Workers: Evidence From the Oil Industry

We study the long-term impact of job displacement from a big state owned enterprise as a result of its privatization in a developing country. Our results suggest large reductions in earnings, which persist throughout the years. However, we also find that the displaced worker’s post-displacement earnings are in line with competitive market wages, and unrelated to sector of employment or to tenure losses, indicating that the long-term reduction in earnings as a result of displacement because of privatization can be traced to the loss of wage rents. Our results indicate that job displacement in SOEs may have very large redistributive implications for the workers involved but that this loss does not necessarily reflect the loss of specific human capital associated to these jobs.

Valuing housework time from willingness to spend time and money for environmental quality improvements

We develop a new approach to assessing the value of home production time based on willingness to spend time and money to obtain environmental improvements. When peoples’ choice is constrained by time as well as money, measures of willingness to pay can be defined with respect to either numeraire. In a model that explicitly allows for multiple shadow values of time, we show that the willingness to pay time and money measures are linked through the value of saving time. With survey information on peoples’ willingness to spend additional time on housework activities, as well as pay money, to obtain environmental quality improvements, joint estimation within a utility-consistent structure produces estimates of both willingness to pay and the value of saving housework time. From the value of saving housework time, the marginal value of housework time can be readily identified. When applied to Korean households’ valuation of water quality improvements in the Man Kyoung River, we find that the value of housework time is 70–80% of the market wage.

The economics of gay and lesbian couples: Introduction to a special issue on gay and lesbian households

This article presents a simple conceptual framework integrating three couple-related outcomes analyzed in this volume: wage differentials in earnings related to couple formation, household formation (including cohabitation and registration as Registered Domestic Partnership), and intra-household allocation of income. It also discusses some of the articles’ main findings.

The Decomposition of Firm-size Wage Differentials

No completely satisfactory explanation for the persistent and well-documented large-firm wage premium has been found. I use a novel adaptation of the Oaxaca/Blinder wage discrimination model to examine the firm-size wage differential which allows the wage differential to be decomposed into the portions attributable to (1) differences in employee endowments, (2) how the firm values these endowments, and (3) residual differences. Small firms actually pay higher wages based on how they value their workers’ endowments, but this wage premium was overshadowed by the superior endowments of workers in large firms and a residual differential in favor of large firms.

Return to Education and the Changing Role of Credentials in the Croatian Labor Market

The countries of Central and Eastern Europe experienced a rapid increase of return to education with the advent of the transition. We look at the dynamics of wage premiums in Croatia and estimate how much the return to education has changed between 1996 and 2004 on the basis of labor force survey data. We also extend the paper in order to address additional features of the wage structure, such as non-linearities in the return to education associated with attainment of credentials. We find that contrary to most transition countries, premiums for education in Croatia began to grow only after the mid 1990s. However, by 2004, they reached the levels of premiums found in other transition countries and advanced market economies, thus creating market incentives for investment in education. We also find that major part of this higher rate of return came through higher return to credentials.

Chinese Contract Law and the Economic Reform

China’s previous contract laws had many contradictions and failed to meet the needs of China’s developing market economy. Although some problems still need to be dealt with, the unified contract law is more advanced, systematic and plays an important role in fostering and encouraging transactions.

How Living Wage Legislation Affects U.S. Poverty Rates

I investigate how living wage legislation affects poverty. I find evidence that living wage ordinances modestly reduce poverty rates where such ordinances are enacted. However, there is no evidence that state minimum wage laws do so. The difference in the impacts of the two types of legislation conceivably stems from a difference in the party responsible for bearing the burden of the cost.

“Family-Friendly” Fringe Benefits and the Gender Wage Gap

Evidence suggests a large portion of the gender wage gap is explained by gender occupational segregation. A common hypothesis is that gender differences in preferences or abilities explain this segregation; women may prefer jobs that provide more “family-friendly” fringe benefits. Much of the research provides no direct evidence on gender differences in access to fringe benefits, nor how provision affects wages. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we find that women are more likely to receive family-friendly benefits, but not other types of fringe benefits. We find no evidence that the differences in fringe benefits explain the gender wage gap.

Does Motherhood Affect Productivity, Relative Performance, and Earnings?

The Ladies Professional Golf Association provides a unique setting to examine productivity differences between women with children and women without children. In this paper, productivity is directly observed (e.g., the player’s golf score), unlike most studies that use wage as a proxy for productivity. Therefore, discrimination cannot be a source of observed differences in productivity between mothers and nonmothers, since the earnings of players are strictly determined by relative performance. Using panel data on women professional golfers, I find that motherhood lowers productivity. The productivity of women who eventually become mothers increases in the years before giving birth and then declines thereafter. The results support the human-capital explanation and Becker’s effort hypothesis of the family gap. One further finding is that marriage increases productivity.

Married Couples’ Time Allocation Decisions and Marital Stability

The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), 1985–1992, are the data used to simultaneously examine the role of family stability to both market and household time allocation for both spouses and the role of couples’ time allocation in their probability of divorce. The study found that increases in the probabilities of divorce were only significantly correlated with decreases in wife’s housework time. It was also found by the study that increases in the husband’s market work hours and increases in the wife’s household work hours had negative effects on the probability of divorce.

Union Worker Wage Effect in the Public Sector

This study examines union wage premiums in the public sector for the 1998–2004 period. Unlike previous studies, our approach estimates union wage premiums considering differences in the rewards to education, experience, and other personal characteristics for union and non-union workers. The approach provides a larger estimated wage gap than the traditional approach, and allows for simulations of union–nonunion wage gaps for different types of workers. Moreover, we use an Oaxaca decomposition to explain the larger union–nonunion wage gap in the private sector in comparison to that in the public sector. We find that between 50% and 60% of the difference in union wage premiums between the private and public sectors is due to differences in the way unionized workers are rewarded in the private and public sectors, while the remaining portion is due to differences in personal characteristics of private and public sector workers.

The connection between maternal employment and childhood obesity: inspecting the mechanisms

This paper investigates the channels through which maternal employment affects childhood obesity. We use time diaries and interview responses from the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics which combines information on children’s time allocation, children’s BMI, and mother’s labor force participation. We find some evidence that supervision and nutrition play significant but small roles in the relationship between maternal employment and childhood obesity. Although the difference in the effect of maternal employment varies by mother’s education, we find few differences in the mechanisms by mother’s education.

The Heterogeneous Effect of the Passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act on Stock Returns

I analyze how stock prices reacted to the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) of 1970. Previous studies focus on accounting measures or actual OSHA violations, and my work complements the literature by examining how shareholders expected OSHA to affect firm profitability. Returns fell around the OSH bill’s release to the House floor and its eventual passage, and average market value dropped by $1.5 million over the 3 days surrounding House Rules Committee release. Durable manufacturing and mining industries were hardest hit in OSH passage, losing $2.6 million and $5.7 million in average market value, respectively. I also find that larger firms with poorer working conditions sustained more negative returns, and market power, not union density, explains variation in expected profitability. Furthermore, future penalties appear unrelated to shareholder expectations about compliance costs.

Labor market participation in France: an asymptotic least squares analysis of couples’ decisions

This paper examines the interactions between spouses’ decisions to join the labor force. We use the asymptotic least squares method in order to estimate a system of equations with limited dependent variables. We find that when spouse’s decision-making is modeled as simultaneous, this affects primarily the man’s participation equation who appears to be positively influenced by whether the woman works or not, by the number of children and by the birth of a child. The woman’s decision to participate is not affected by whether the man participates or not and depends negatively of the number of children and the birth of a child. This implies that there is a female leadership in decisions to participate in the labor market and that the added-worker effect should be reinterpreted as a function of demography rather than unemployment.

Britain’s Labor Market Under the Blair Governments

Since the Labor Party returned to power in 1997, a substantial increase in employment regulation has occurred in the United Kingdom. Britain has enacted new laws on labor union recognition, introduced a national minimum wage, enhanced employment protection legislation, strengthened anti-discrimination legislation, and imposed many new obligations on employers. Employment regulation should not, however, be looked at in isolation. The potential for job loss implicit in some of the Blair administrations’ regulation has been offset by other factors which have broadly supported labor market flexibility. This does not mean that further regulation can be imposed with impunity. Although the UK labor market continues to perform better than those of the large continental European economies, its competitiveness may be slipping. When Mr. Blair retires, the prospects may deteriorate.

The impact of biological preferences on parental investments in children and step-children

A remarriage typically involves significant changes in a family’s financial circumstance, and these changes, combined with the relative bargaining relationship between spouses, likely affect the well-being of the children who are part of the family. In this paper, I use the separate-spheres model, a theoretical model that explains the determinants of bargaining power in marriage, to analyze how a remarried couple’s bargaining relationship affects their child investment in stepfamilies. Based on this theoretical model, I build and estimate an empirical model that investigates the determinants of parental investment. As evidence of parental preference for biological children over stepchildren, I find that an increased wage rate of a biological mother significantly improves her child investment when her husband is a stepfather of the child, while there is no such effect for mothers living with the biological father of the child.

Does housework matter anymore? The shifting impact of housework on economic inequality

In recent years, American women’s housework time has declined while American men’s housework time has risen. We examine how these changes have affected economic inequality in the United States. Using time-diary data from the Time Use in Economic and Social Accounts, 1975–1976 (N = 1,484) and the American Time Use Survey, 2003 (N = 5,534), we value adults’ housework using two alternative methodologies and assess its influence on households’ real access to goods and services in both years. Results suggest that housework reduces economic inequality in both years. But, between 1975–1976 and 2002–2003, overall economic inequality rose largely because of the growing wage inequality and also, in part, because of growth in housework inequality. Socio-demographic change partially inhibited the overall growth in economic inequality.