Local labor markets,children and labor force participation of wives

Most research on married women’s labor force participation relates characteristics of individual women to their probability of labor force participation. Some studies relate characteristics of geographic areas to average labor force participation rates in those areas, although these aggregate level analyses are usually gross tests of ideas about individuallevel processes. Here we take a quintessentially sociological perspective and seek to understand how characteristics of geographic areas structure the relationship between properties of individual women and their probabilities oflabor force participation. Our analysis has two steps. In step one, we fit individual-level probit models of married women’s probability of labor force participation. A separate model is fitted in each of 409 areas using 1970 Census data, and the relationship between individual characteristics and labor force participation is found to vary substantially across areas. In step two, we attempt to explain areal variation in the effects of women’s children on their labor force participation. We hypothesize that the effect of children on their mothers’ labor force participation is a function ofthe cost and availability of childcare, and of the “convenience” of jobs for working mothers in the places where the mothers live. Measures of childcare cost, childcare availability and job convenience are developed. Weighted least squares analyses of probit coefficients from the first stage are, in general, very consistent with our findings, and suggest that the approach taken in this paper is likely to be a fruitful one for future studies.     

Internal labor markets and the effects of structural change: Job mobility in Korean labor markets between 1998 and 2000

This study examines job mobility in Korean labor markets since the 1997 economic crisis. The rising job mobility in Korea is analyzed by focusing on structural change in labor markets. Using the Korean Labor and Income Panel Study and discrete-time event history analysis, I estimate the job-stabilizing effects of internal labor markets and the effects of structural change on job mobility. The major findings are as follows: First, I found that internal labor markets were weakening between 1998 and 2000. Second, the job-stabilizing effects of internal labor markets on job mobility diminished between 1998 and 2000. Finally, the magnitude of the effects of internal labor markets on job mobility was contingent on the level of structural change. The effect of internal labor markets on job mobility was stronger in turbulent or contracting industries. This effect, however, also became weaker over time. The implications for Korean labor markets are discussed.     

Metropolitan social structure,labor markets,and fertility

This paper develops and examines a community-level model of fertility, incorporating both sociological and economic theoretical perspectives. Data from several government and private sources are analyzed in a series of reduced-form, multivariate regression models. Generally, the results demonstrate that while the conceptual relationships from both schools receive some empirical support, the social structural characteristics (such as social class, religious and ethnic composition) offer somewhat greater explanatory power. In a subsequent analytic stage, principal components analysis is employed in order to estimate a series of revised models, clarifying some inconsistencies found when employing a more “naive” model testing strategy.     

Imperfect goods and labor markets, and the union wage gap

Existing theoretical literature fails to explain satisfactorily the differences between the pay of workers who are covered by collective agreements and others who are not. This study aims at providing a model framework that is amenable to an analysis of this issue. Our general-equilibrium approach integrates a dual labor market and a two-sector product market. The results suggest that the so-called “union wage gap” is largely determined by the degree of centralization of the bargains and, to a somewhat lesser extent, by the expenditure share of the unionized sector's goods.

新疆城镇贫困及反贫困研究

新疆目前的贫困是农村地区的贫困。随着改革开放事业的逐步深入,新疆城镇出现了大量的贫困群体,他们对新疆的社会稳定和经济发展的影响比较大,其消极影响不能忽视。造成新疆城镇贫困的主要原因是就业不足、市场机制不完善和城镇社会保障制度不健全等。为解决城镇贫困问题,我们必须以人为本,扩大就业,逐步完善社会保障制度,政策上采取各种优惠措施,尽量保证城镇贫困群体的根本利益。     

Urban poverty and health in developing countries: Household and neighborhood Effects

In the United States and other high-income countries, there is intense scholarly and programmatic interest in the effects of household and neighborhood living standards on health. Yet few studies of developing-country cities have explored these issues. We investigated whether the health of urban women and children in poor countries is influenced by both household and neighborhood standards of living. Using data from the urban samples of 85 Demographic and Health Surveys and modeling living standards using factor-analytic MIMIC methods, we found that the neighborhoods of relatively poor households are more heterogeneous than is often asserted. Our results indicated that poor urban households do not tend to live in uniformly poor neighborhoods: about 1 in 10 of a poor household’s neighbors is relatively affluent, belonging to the upper quartile of the urban distribution of living standards. Do household and neighborhood living standards influence health? Using multivariate models, we found that household living standards are closely associated with three health measures: unmet need for modern contraception, attendance of a trained health care provider at childbirth, and young children’s height for age. Neighborhood living standards exert a significant additional influence in many of the surveys we examined, especially for birth attendance.     

Explaining levels of within-group wage inequality in U.S. labor markets

Most research on earnings inequality has focused on the growing gap between workers of different races and at different education, age, and income levels, but a large portion of the increasing inequality has actually occurred within these groups. This article focuses on the extent and sources of "within-group" wage inequality in more than 500 labor markets in the United States in 1990. In addition to documenting that within-group wage inequality across regions varies more widely today than over the past several decades, the analysis reveals that two frequently cited explanations of rising wage inequality over time have little impact on within-group wage inequality when measured at the local labor market level: (1) industrial shifts and (2) increased technology and trade. By contrast, flexible and insecure employment conditions (e.g., unemployment, contingent work, and immigration) are associated strongly with high local levels of within-group wage inequality, especially among women.     

我国劳动力供需增长的城乡构成

转型时期以来 ,我国劳动力供需增长重心都已明显地转移到城镇地区 ,但也不可忽视全国劳动力存量重心仍在农村。不论从存量还是从增量看 ,城乡都存在供过于求的矛盾 ,必须在加快城市化发展进程中努力扩增城市就业容量 ,充分发挥城市化对城乡就业压力的双向疏降作用。     

Child poverty and changes in child poverty

This article offers a cross-country overview of child poverty, changes in child poverty, and the impact of public policy in North America and Europe. Levels and changes in child poverty rates in 12 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries during the 1990s are documented using data from the Luxembourg Income Study project, and a decomposition analysis is used to uncover the relative role of demographic factors, labor markets, and income transfers from the state in determining the magnitude and direction of the changes. Child poverty rates fell noticeably in only three countries and rose in three others. In no country were demographic factors a force for higher child poverty rates, but these factors were also limited in their ability to cushion children from adverse shocks originating in the labor market or the government sector. Increases in the labor market engagement of mothers consistently lowered child poverty rates, while decreases in the employment rates and earnings of fathers were a force for higher rates. Finally, there is no single road to lower child poverty rates. Reforms to income transfers intended to increase labor supply may or may not end up lowering the child poverty rate.     

农村人口流动对农田生态建设的影响

本文从我国实际出发,分析了农村剩余劳动力流出及其回流对农田生态建设的影响,趋利避害,因势利导,为新形势下我国农田生态建设提出相应的建议,以期为我国经济建设提供良好的生态环境支持和强大的经济动力。     

International labor migration and domestic labor supply

Prominent among the variety of issues raised by the immigration of labor are its effects on domestic wage rates and labor supply. In contrast to the existing literature, this paper constructs a dynamic, general equilibrium framework to study the relationship between international labor migration and domestic labor supply. The general equilibrium nature of the model enables us to endogenize the pattern of labor migration. The effect of labor migration on domestic wage rates and labor supply is shown to depend on the pattern of labor migration. If the substitution effect dominates the income effect in labor supply, the domestic supply of labor necessarily decreases in response to an inflow of migrants. This happens even if immigrants, through their savings behavior, cause an increase in the domestic capital-labor ratio and wage rate. Similarly, if the dominant effect is the income effect, the immigration of labor necessarily increases the domestic supply of labor.I wish to thank Oded Galor, Harl Ryder, Kalpana Kochhar and two referees for valuable comments. The opinions expressed in this paper are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Joel Popkin and Company.     

Women's labor force transitions in connection with childbirth: a panel data comparison between Germany,Sweden and Great Britain

In this paper we make use of the panel aspects of the German GSOEP, the Swedish HUS and the British BHPS data. In these data sets we known month and year of childbirth and the month to month labor force status of the mother also before giving birth. This permits analysis of labor force transitions triggered by child births of different birth orders. From macro data Swedish women are known to have the highest labor force participation. The difference in total labor force participation of women is totally a result of fewer mothers entering the labor force and entering later in Germany and Great Britain than in Sweden. This paper shows that before birth of first child there is no such difference. We find that German and British women have even higher full-time labor force participation than Swedish women 12 months before the birth of the first child. The difference is more pronounced for second and third births than for first births. We suggest that these differences are caused by different family policy regimes where Germany can be characterized as a breadwinner regime and Sweden a regime oriented towards equal role sharing of father and mother. Our results on determinants of being in the labor force both after and before the birth of a child as well as determinants of the tempo of entering the labor force after birth shows that women's own human capital is important both in Germany and Great Britain, whereas in Sweden also less educated women have entered the labor force by the time the child is 2 years old.All correspondence to Cécile Wetzels. We are grateful to Andrew McCulloch from ESRC Research Centre on Micro-Social Change in Britain, who delivered the British BHPS-data. We also want to thank John F. Ermisch, Siv Gustafsson, Diane Sainsbury and two anonymous referees for useful comments. Financial support has been received by the Swedish Council in the Humanities and Social Sciences and the EU Human Capital and Mobility (HCM) network for the Female Labour Force Participation Network within which framework this analysis has been carried out. Responsible editors: S. S. Gustafsson, John R Ermisch.     

Individual and structural explanations of poverty

This article illustrates the difference between individual and structural accounts of poverty in the U.S. Some of the correlates of poverty among individuals are job loss, low skills, female family head, discrimination against blacks and hispanics, family size, and age at marriage. The structural factors producing a high rate of poverty are the reproduction of the class system, macroeconomic policies, the vicious circle of poverty, the structure of the electoral process, the structure of the economy, institutionalized gender discrimination, and institutionalized ethnic discrimination. Thus, the variables accounting for each phenomenon are different. A theoretical rationale for the relationship between social structure and rates of events is presented, and similarities between the approach used here and research in other disciplines are noted.     

The dimensions of poverty

The nature of ‘poverty’ is examined in relation to a model of causes affecting the welfare of a community. It is suggested that one can operationally distinguish four major dimensions of poverty, namely economic, social, political and legal poverty; and that one might in addition be able to characterise three further aspects, namely psychological, ideological and conceptual poverty. It is proposed that at least the first four aspects should be distinguished and explicitly named, thereby specifically characterising these different dimensions of ‘poverty’; and that this would serve a useful purpose in clarifying the nature of the problems faced by the community considered.     

吉林省城镇就业、失业和劳动参与的现状和对策

依据劳动经济理论,应用吉林省的微观数据,从劳动力的人口特征、受教育程度特征、户籍特征和地区差异等角度,研究吉林省失业率、就业率和劳动参与率的现状。针对吉林省城镇劳动就业中存在的问题,提出树立就业优先、发展新兴产业与第三产业、促进中小企业发展、健全劳动力市场体系和健全失业保险制度的政策建议。     

Urban segregation in Sweden housing policy,housing markets,and the spacial distribution of households in metropolitan areas

The postwar Swedish housing standard has been raised considerably. But there were also unforeseen and undesired side effects in the form of increasing segregation. Between 1965–1975 a great number of rental apartments were built in the periphery of the metropolitan areas. They originally received an overrepresentation of the poor, immigrants, social welfare recipients, and members of the working class. Today these areas face long distances, increasing deterioration and the lower socioeconomic level of their population is accentuated. The following wave of rebuilding in the central metropolitan areas also reinforced residential segregation. As the dwellings became larger and totally modern, the rents rose. Ownership forms often changed to tenant-owned dwellings which drove up the prices of tenant-owned dwellings. The older working-class population was replaced by wealthy families with middle-class backgrounds. The rebuilding in the city centers has in all likelihood been the motor in the overall relocations and migrations of the metropolitan populations during the 1980s. The movement of the middle-class towards the centers corresponds to an increased concentration of workers and various resource-weak groups on the peripheries. This analysis uses a new large micro data base integrating Swedish census and level-of-living survey data on individuals, households and neighbourhoods.Housing segregation has not been seen as a very serious problem in Sweden. Attention has primarily been aimed at providing spatial and modern dwellings for everyone. The construction of housing was explosive through the middle of the 1970s, and it has been supported by substantial general subsidies. Today, Sweden, together with Norway, has Europe's highest and most evenly distributed housing standard. Overcrowding and unmodern housing have for all practical purposes been abolished.     

A Marxian-Malthusian view of poverty and development

Abstract The names of Marx and Malthus are often linked in disjunction but never in conjunction. Nevertheless, the thesis argued in this paper is that the two historically dominant theories of poverty, the Marxian and the Malthusian, are not inconsistent, but complementary; that a union of the two yields a basic fourfold typology of social classes by differential ownership of property and differential fertility; that this typology can also be viewed as a way of disaggregating the meaningless average of 'GNP per head' in a way which gives social content (i.e. a distributional dimension) to the concept; that the typology provides more satisfactory definitions of 'development' and 'overpopulation'; and that these four categories are improved, or usefully supplemented, by replacing the flowof income by the stock of wealth in each case. Also the universality of the typology is discussed along with some preliminary empirical considerations.     

Early teen marriage and future poverty

Both early teen marriage and dropping out of high school have historically been associated with a variety of negative outcomes, including higher poverty rates throughout life. Are these negative outcomes due to preexisting differences, or do they represent the causal effect of marriage and schooling choices? To better understand the true personal and societal consequences, in this article, I use an instrumental variables (IV) approach that takes advantage of variation in state laws regulating the age at which individuals are allowed to marry, drop out of school, and begin work. The baseline IV estimate indicates that a woman who marries young is 31 percentage points more likely to live in poverty when she is older. Similarly, a woman who drops out of school is 11 percentage points more likely to be poor. The results are robust to a variety of alternative specifications and estimation methods, including limited information maximum likelihood (LIML) estimation and a control function approach. While grouped ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates for the early teen marriage variable are also large, OLS estimates based on individual-level data are small, consistent with a large amount of measurement error.Historically, individuals were allowed to enter into a marriage contract at a very young age. In Ancient Rome, the appropriate minimum age was regarded as 14 for males and 12 for females. When Rome became Christianized, these age minimums were adopted into the ecclesiastical law of the Catholic Church. This canon law governed most marriages in Western Europe until the Reformation. When England broke away from the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church carried with it the same minimum age requirements for the prospective bride and groom. The minimum age requirements of 12 and 14 were eventually written into English civil law. By default, these provisions became the minimum marriage ages in colonial America. These common laws inherited from the British remained in force in America unless a specific state law was enacted to replace them (see “Marriage Law,” Encyclopædia Britannica 2005; http://www.britannica.com).While Roman, Catholic, English, and early American law may have allowed marriage at 12 for girls and 14 for boys, many questioned the advisability of such early unions. Researchers and policymakers around the turn of the twentieth century recognized that teens may be especially ill-prepared to assume the familial responsibilities and financial pressures associated with marriage.¹ As a result of the changing economic and social landscape of the United States, in the latter part of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century, individual states began to slowly raise the minimum legal age at which individuals were allowed to marry. In the United States, as in most developed countries, age restrictions have been revised upward so that they are now between 15 and 21 years of age.During this same time period, dramatic changes were also occurring in the educational system of the United States (see Goldin 1998, 1999; Goldin and Katz 1997, 2003; Lleras-Muney 2002). Free public schooling at the elementary level spread across the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century, and free secondary schooling proliferated in the early part of the twentieth century. As secondary schooling became more commonplace, states began to pass compulsory schooling laws. States often also passed child labor laws that stipulated minimum age or schooling requirements before a work permit would be granted. These state-specific compulsory schooling and child labor laws are correlated with the legal restrictions on marriage age, indicating that it might be important to consider the impact of all the laws simultaneously.There are at least two rationales often given for the use of state laws as policy instruments to limit teenagers’ choices. The first argument is that teens do not accurately compare short-run benefits versus long-run costs. If teens are making myopic decisions, restrictive state laws could prevent decisions they will later regret. It is also argued that the adverse effects associated with teenagers’ choices impose external costs on the rest of society. If these effects can be prevented, external costs (such as higher welfare expenditures) would also argue for restrictive state laws. Both teenage marriage and dropping out of high school are closely associated with a variety of negative outcomes, including poverty later in life. To assess the relevance of either argument, however, it is important to know whether the observed effects are causal.Any observed negative effects may be due to preexisting differences rather than a causal relationship between teen marriage (or schooling choices) and adverse adult outcomes. Women who marry as teens or drop out of school may come from more disadvantaged backgrounds or possess other unobserved characteristics that would naturally lead to worse outcomes. For example, teens choosing to marry young might have lower unobserved earnings ability, making it hard to draw conclusions about the causal relationship between teenage marriage and poverty.To identify the effect of a teenager’s marriage and schooling choices on future poverty, I use state-specific marriage, schooling, and child labor laws as instruments. Variation in these laws across states and over time can be used to identify the causal impact that teen marriage and high school completion have on future economic well-being. Although compulsory schooling laws have been used as instruments in a variety of settings, this appears to be the first time marriage laws have been used as instruments. The idea of the marriage law instrument is that states with restrictive marriage laws will prevent some teenagers from marrying who would have married young had they lived in a state with more permissive laws.Using the marriage, schooling, and labor laws affecting teens as instruments for early marriage and high school completion, I find strong negative effects for both variables on future poverty status. The baseline instrumental variables (IV) estimates imply that a woman who marries young is 31 percentage points more likely to live in poverty when she is older. Similarly, a woman who drops out of school is 11 percentage points more likely to be living in a family whose income is below the poverty line. The IV results are robust to a variety of alternative specifications and estimation methods, including limited information maximum likelihood (LIML) estimation and a control function approach. In comparison, the ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates are very sensitive to how the data is aggregated, particularly for the early marriage variable. OLS estimates using grouped data are also large, while OLS estimates using individual-level data indicate a small effect for early teen marriage. Auxiliary data indicate a large amount of measurement error in the early marriage variable, suggesting the presence of attenuation bias in the individual-level OLS estimates.The remainder of the article proceeds as follows. I first briefly review the negative outcomes associated with teenage marriage and dropping out of school and discuss alternative perspectives on why teens might make these decisions. The following section describes the data and presents OLS estimates. The next section discusses the early marriage, compulsory schooling, and child labor laws that will be used as instruments. I then present the instrumental variable estimates and conduct several specification and robustness checks, including a discussion of measurement error issues and a reconciliation with the literature on teenage childbearing.