Get a job and keep it! High school employment and adult wealth accumulation

Wealth inequality receives substantial scholarly attention, but mounting evidence suggests that childhood and adolescent traits and experiences contribute to financial disparities in the United States. This study examines the relationship between adolescent labor force participation and adult wealth accumulation. I argue that employed high school students gain practical life skills, abilities, and knowledge from work experience and business exposure that shape investment decisions and affect overall net worth. I use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 cohort, to empirically explore this idea. This study extends the wealth literature by identifying adolescent employment as an important mechanism that improves adult net worth and financial well-being.     

Union Formation in Later Life: Economic Determinants of Cohabitation and Remarriage Among Older Adults

This study builds on Becker's and Oppenheimer's theories of union formation to examine the economic determinants of marriage and cohabitation during older adulthood. Based on the 1998-2006 Health and Retirement Study and a sample of previously married Americans who are at least 50 years old, results show that wealthier older adults, regardless of gender, are more likely to repartner than stay single. Wealth has no discernable effect on the likelihood of remarrying versus cohabiting. Among the oldest men, the positive associations between wealth and repartnering are entirely due to housing assets. Results suggest that Oppenheimer's theory of marriage timing may be more applicable to later-life union formation than Becker's independence hypothesis. Further, economic disadvantage does not appear to characterize later-life cohabitation, unlike cohabitation during young adulthood. These findings help illuminate the union formation process during older adulthood and are timely considering demographic changes reshaping the American population.     

Measures and meaning in comparisons of wealth equlality

How communities distribute wealth is one aspect for judging the performance of economic systems. Many inequality measures exist. Precentiles, Gini coefficients, and statistical pattern measures each rest on different concepts about what equality and inequality mean. Wealth distribution data from 55 communities are compared relative to Gini coefficient, kurtosis, and coefficient of variation. These data show no community with perfect equality. Most communities have some inequality. The general pattern is for wealth inequality to increase with the development of market and mechanized industrial economies.     

Economic inequality and child stunting in Bangladesh and Kenya: an investigation of six hypotheses

Consistent with the increasing focus on issues of equity in developing countries, I extend the literature analyzing the relationship between economic inequality and individual health to the developing world. Using survey data from Bangladesh and Kenya with economic status measured by a wealth index and with three different geographic definitions of community, I analyze six competing hypotheses for how economic inequality may be related to stunting among children younger than 5 years old. I find little support for the predominant hypothesis that economic inequality as measured by a Gini index is an important predictor of individual health. Instead, I find that the difference between a household's wealth and the mean household wealth in the community is the measure of economic inequality that is most closely related to stunting in these countries. In particular, a 1 standard deviation increase in household wealth relative to the community mean is associated with a 30–32 percent decrease in the odds of stunting in Bangladesh and a 16–21 percent decrease in the odds of stunting in Kenya.     

Wealth transfer receipt and later life wealth

Wealth ownership is highly concentrated in the U.S. and this inequality may be reproduced in subsequent generations through wealth transfers. Yet we do not know how households respond to the receipt of a wealth transfer and whether time amplifies the initial benefit of a wealth transfer. Using the Survey of Consumer Finances, we test whether wealth transfer recipients gain an advantage that cumulates with time. We find that the positive association between transfer amount and present net worth weakens as time elapsed since transfer receipt increases. The larger the wealth transfer, the more its association with net worth is diminished by time since transfer receipt. Though wealth transfers provide recipients with a significant initial advantage, households appear to adapt to wealth transfer receipt by some combination of reduced savings and increased consumption. We demonstrate an association between receiving a larger wealth transfer and one type of increased consumption, gift-giving.     

Children's Economic Roles in the Maya Family Life Cycle: Cain,Caldwell, and Chayanov Revisited

This article examines the relationship between household demographic pressure and interage transfers for a group of Maya subsistence agriculturists in Yucatán, Mexico. The authors use data from a field study conducted in 1992–93 on individual time allocation, relative productivity by age and sex, and caloric costs of activities to estimate age schedules of average consumption and production. Using these, they investigate the net costs of children to their parents and find that children have a negative net asset value up to the time they leave home. The direction of net wealth flows in this group is downward, from older to younger, and in economic terms the internal rate of return to children is highly negative up to the time they leave home. Nonetheless, children play a critically important role in the family's economic life cycle. On average, girls offset 76 percent of their consumption costs before leaving home at age 19, and boys offset 82 percent before leaving home at 22. Without the contributions from children as a group, parents would have to double or triple their work effort during part of the family life cycle if they were to raise the same number of children. By the thirteenth year of the family life cycle, children as a group produce more than half of what they consume in every year, and after the twentieth year children produce more than 80 percent of what they as a group consume. The authors also find that the elderly in the sample, ages 50 to 65, produce more than they consume. Thus while children have a negative net asset value to parents, the timing of their children's economic contribution across the family life cycle plays a key role in underwriting the cost of large families.     

The gender longevity gap: explaining the difference between singles and couples

This paper studies the respective gender longevity gap in favour of women among singles, utilitarian and altruistic couples. The following hypotheses are derived: (1) the gender longevity gap is smaller within couples than among singles; (2) marriage increases longevity of men but decreases longevity of women; and (3) the gender longevity gap decreases with an increase in wealth. The hypotheses are tested using a complete data set of the Swiss deceased at the age 65+ in 2001 and 2002, with information on the individuals’ age at death and their average earnings over the life cycle.     

Wealth Inequality Among Immigrants: Consistent Racial/Ethnic Inequality in the United States

Wealth is a strong indicator of immigrant integration in U.S. society. Drawing on new assimilation theory, we highlight the importance of racial/ethnic group boundaries and propose different paths of wealth integration among U.S. immigrants. Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and quantile regression, we show that race/ethnicity shapes immigrant wealth inequality across the entire distribution of net worth, along with immigrants’ U.S. experience, such as immigrant status, U.S. education, English language proficiency, and time spent in the United States. Our results document consistent racial/ethnic inequality among immigrants, also evidenced among the U.S. born, revealing that even when accounting for key aspects of U.S. experience, wealth inequality with whites for Latino and black immigrants is strong.     

Gender equality and the sex differential in mortality from accidents in high income nations

Despite their neglect by researchers relative to other causes of death, motor vehicle and other accidents contribute substantially to sex differences in mortality and address theoretical debates over the consequences of gender equality. A reduction-in-protection hypothesis argues that gender equality reduces the female advantage in accident mortality, a reduction-in-inequality hypothesis argues that gender equality increases the advantage, and an institutional adjustment hypothesis argues that gender equality initially reduces and then increases the advantage. The analysis tests these hypotheses using data on age-specific male and female accident mortality rates and indicators of work and family status for 18 high income nations from 1955–1994.In support of the institutional adjustment hypothesis, declining differentials in male and female motor vehicle and other accident mortality rates level off and sometimes increase in recent years, and measures of work and family change generally have similar curvilinear influences on the differential. Across nations, gender equality speeds the reversal in the differential for motor vehicle accidents, but not for other accidents.     

Gender Inequality,Maternal Mortality and Inclusive Growth in Nigeria

The relevance of women in contributing to inclusive growth and consequently economic development in Nigeria cannot be overemphasized. Women play important social, economic and productive roles in any economy. Maternal mortality rate refers to the annual number of deaths of women from pregnancy-related causes per 100,000 live births, and Nigeria’s rate is still relatively high at about 630 when compared with the figures of the developed countries. For inclusive growth to be achieved in Nigeria, women should not be neglected and marginalized so they can contribute their quota to the growth of the country, but maternal mortality rate needs to be reduced because it is only the living that can make contributions to growth. Thus, this study examined the long run effect of gender inequality, maternal mortality and inclusive growth in Nigeria using time series data spanning from 1985 to 2017, and employed the ARDL econometric technique. The results showed that gender inequality and maternal mortality have negative impacts on inclusive growth in Nigeria. Therefore, the study recommends that women should be properly taken care of during pregnancy so that the maternal mortality rate can be reduced and hence they will be able to make meaningful contributions to the growth of the Nigerian economy.

     

The Multidimensional Gender Inequalities Index (MGII): A Descriptive Analysis of Gender Inequalities Using MCA

This paper constructs a weighted measure of the multidimensional concept of gender inequality: the Multidimensional Gender Inequality Index (MGII). Multiple Correspondence Analysis is used to rank the separate forms in which gender inequality appears in developed and developing countries respectively. Eight dimensions were identified as relevant for economic purposes: identity, physical integrity, intra-family laws, political activity, education, health, access to economic resources, and economic activity. In the 109 developing countries considered, gender inequality in the identity and family dimensions are particularly severe for women: these dimensions hence have greater weight in the MGII. However, in OECD countries gender inequality occurs mainly in the political and family dimensions. Nevertheless, the family sphere remains particularly important for gender inequality, whatever the level of development. The MGII is a non-linear weighted composite indicator of gender inequality which yields a country ranking. The South-Asian region is calculated to be the most unequal.     

Explaining the Gender Wealth Gap

To assess and explain the United States’ gender wealth gap, we use the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study to examine wealth accumulated by a single cohort over 50 years by gender, by marital status, and limited to the respondents who are their family’s best financial reporters. We find large gender wealth gaps between currently married men and women, and between never-married men and women. The never-married accumulate less wealth than the currently married, and there is a marital disruption cost to wealth accumulation. The status-attainment model shows the most power in explaining gender wealth gaps between these groups explaining about one-third to one-half of the gap, followed by the human-capital explanation. In other words, a lifetime of lower earnings for women translates into greatly reduced wealth accumulation. After controlling for the full model, we find that a gender wealth gap remains between married men and women that we speculate may be related to gender differences in investment strategies and selection effects.     

The Marriage Wealth Premium Revisited: Gender Disparities and Within-Individual Changes in Personal Wealth in Germany

This study examines the association between marriage and economic wealth of women and men. Going beyond previous research that focused on household wealth, I examine personal wealth, which allows identifying gender disparities in the association between marriage and wealth. Using unique data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (2002, 2007, and 2012), I apply random-effects and fixed-effects regression models to test my expectations. I find that both women and men experience substantial marriage wealth premiums not only in household wealth but also in personal wealth. However, I do not find consistent evidence for gender disparities in these general marriage premiums. Additional analyses indicate, however, that women’s marriage premiums are substantially lower than men’s premiums in older cohorts and when only nonhousing wealth is considered. Overall, this study provides new evidence that women and men gain unequally in their wealth attainment through marriage.     

Gender Gaps in Care Work: Evidences from Argentina,Chile, Spain and Uruguay

This paper is a comparative analysis of the gender gaps in the non-paid domestic and care work (NPDCW) undertaken in homes in Argentina, Chile, Spain and Uruguay. The explanatory factors of this gap in two-income households and their magnitude and impact on the distribution of NPDCW are analyzed using data from national time use surveys. The weakness of micro-sociological approaches and the variables related to relative resources and time availability is demonstrated using the estimation of a regression model, while the importance of approximations of gender roles and analyses that incorporate macro-sociological factors is shown. Furthermore, the findings show that NPDCW is done by women in 70% of cases with women’s incomes and time availability among the individual variables that drive change within the couple. The results show that the equalizing effects of time availability and gender ideology are stronger for women in more egalitarian countries; women in less egalitarian countries benefit less from their individual-level assets. Additional comparative analysis shows that other macro-level factors (economic development, female labor-force participation, gender norms and welfare systems) may also influence the division of this work. The results suggest that changes in individual-level factors alone may not be enough to achieve an equal division of labor in the household without a parallel reduction in macro-level gender inequality.

     

Gender,power, and population change

This report describes fertility and mortality trends in developing countries and discusses how gender is defined and measured in some countries. The discussion relies on case studies and country statistics to reveal how gender shapes the lives of all people in all societies. Gender is defined as the different roles women and men play in society. Gender is manifested in institutional structures, power relations, and culturally determined behavior. In no society do women and men share equal roles. The effects of inequality for women are manifested differently between countries. The 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo established the goal of gender equality. Educational enrollment and illiteracy are two measures of gender inequality that affect opportunities in society for advancement, power, and status. Girls are less likely to be enrolled in school than boys and more likely to have higher absenteeism rates. In China, absenteeism of girls is actually increasing under reforms. Marriage practices may devalue the investment in girls' education. Women experience different working conditions: they work longer hours, are paid less or not at all, and hold lower-status jobs. The exceptions are found in the Philippines and Brazil, where women hold more professional jobs than men. Women carry multiple responsibilities that consume time and prevent greater involvement in public life. Dowry and brideprice can constrain family relations. Women generally have fewer inheritance rights. Few women hold high-level public office positions or parliamentary seats. The extent to which gender inequality is reflected in demographic processes depends upon the gap in power in education, employment, and income. The relationship between gender and demographic processes is a central topic currently being researched.     

Gender inequalities and demographic behavior

A summary was provided of the central findings about gender inequalities in Egypt, India, Ghana, and Kenya published by the Population Council in 1994. These countries exhibited gender inequalities in different ways: the legal, economic, and educational systems; family planning and reproductive health services; and the health care system. All countries had in common a high incidence of widowhood. Widowhood was linked with high levels of insecurity, which were linked with high fertility. Children thus became insurance in old age. In Ghana, women's insecurity was threatened through high levels of marital instability and polygyny. In Egypt, insecurity was translated into economic vulnerability because of legal discrimination against women when family systems were disrupted. In India and all four countries, insecurity was reflective of limited access to education, an impediment to economic autonomy. In all four countries, women's status was inferior due to limited control over reproductive decision making about childbearing limits and contraception. In India, the cultural devaluation of girls contributed to higher fertility to satisfy the desire for sons. In India and Egypt, family planning programs were dominated by male-run organizations that were more concerned about demographic objectives than reproductive health. The universal inequality was the burden women carry for contraception. Family planning programs have ignored the local realities of reproductive behavior, family structures, and gender relations. The assumption that husbands and wives have similar fertility goals or that fathers fully share the costs of children is mistaken in countries such as Ghana. Consequently, fertility has declined less than 13% in Ghana, but fertility has declined by over 30% in Kenya. Family planning programs must be aware of gender issues.     

Financial Satisfaction in Old Age: A Satisfaction Paradox or a Result of Accumulated Wealth?

Prior research consistently has found that older adults, despite low incomes, are more financially satisfied than younger adults. This “satisfaction paradox” is typically attributed to elders’ supposed psychological accommodation to poor financial circumstances. We advance a different explanation, one that focuses on substantial age differences in wealth and liabilities. Data are from the first wave of the Norwegian NorLAG study (n = 4,169). Findings support the hypothesis that an examination of a wider range of economic variables shows that material circumstances are more important to the financial satisfaction of the elderly than previously believed. A considerable part of the higher financial satisfaction with increasing age can thus be explained by greater assets and less debt among the aged. Nonetheless, assets and debt do not mediate this relationship at lower incomes, because older people with little income have very little accumulated wealth. As older people with little income and wealth have a much stronger tendency to be financially satisfied than their younger, equally poor counterparts, an “aging paradox” still remains in this field.     

The Measurement of Non-economic Inequality in Well-Being Indices

This paper is a critical review of composite well-being indices that account for inequality. Many well-being indices build upon the idea that while income and wealth are important, they do not constitute a person’s actual quality of life. However, first of all, the analysis finds that while well-being indices aim to go “beyond GDP” and other primarily economic indicators, many of them, unfortunately, do not focus on inequality at all. Secondly, most indices which include inequality in their measurement, only account for economic inequality. Thirdly, the article finds that the most comprehensive wellbeing index in terms of inequality is the Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index which adjusts for economic, health and education inequality. This article finds that well-being indices should make further strides to ensure the capture of non-economic inequality in terms of education and health.     

Nativity and older women's health: constructed reliance in the health and retirement study

Gender and nativity are known risk factors for physical and economic dependency. Immigrant women are particularly disadvantaged because of their greater lack of social and economic resources. In this study, we investigate how women immigrants coordinate and utilize various support systems as they approach retirement age, as well as how choices and constraints affect their physical wellbeing. Experiences throughout the life course play a role in the maintenance of health, but the pre-retirement years are particularly crucial to the establishment of patterns of reliance to be used in later life. We examine the effects of economic resources, social support, and family ties (as well as several exogenous variables) on women's physical health using data from the Health and Retirement Survey. For the women in this study, demographic characteristics, such as Hispanic ethnicity and low education are strong risk factors for poor health. Findings also indicate that reliance patterns across resource domains do not differ significantly by nativity and that both economic and familial resource access significantly lessens the risk of poor health for both native and foreign born women.