How do marital status,work effort,and wage rates interact?

How marital status interacts with men's earnings is an important analytic and policy issue, especially in the context of debates in the United States over programs that encourage healthy marriage. This paper generates new findings about the earnings-marriage relationship by estimating the linkages among flows into and out of marriage, work effort, and wage rates. The estimates are based on National Longitudinal Survey of Youth panel data, covering 23 years of marital and labor market outcomes, and control for unobserved heterogeneity. We estimate marriage effects on hours worked (our proxy for work effort) and on wage rates for all men and for black and low-skilled men separately. The estimates reveal that entering marriage raises hours worked quickly and substantially but that marriage's effect on wage rates takes place more slowly while men continue in marriage. Together; the stimulus to hours worked and wage rates generates an 18%-19% increase in earnings, with about one-third to one-half of the marriage earnings premium attributable to higher work effort. At the same time, higher wage rates and hours worked encourage men to marry and to stay married. Thus, being married and having high earnings reinforce each other over time.     

Job turnover, wage rates, and marital stability: How are they related?

This study examines the interplay between job stability, wage rates, and marital stability. We use a Dynamic Selection Control model in which young men make sequential choices about work and family and estimate the model using an approach that takes account of self-selection, simultaneity and unobserved heterogeneity. The results quantify how job stability affects wage rates, how both affect marital status, and how marital status affects earnings and job stability. The study reveals robust evidence that job changes lower wages and the likelihood of getting married and remaining married. At the same time, marriage raises wage rates and job stability. To project the sequential effects linking job change, marital status, and earnings, we simulate the impacts of shocks that raise preferences for marriage and that increase education. Feedback effects cause the simulated wage gains from marriage to cumulate over time, indicating that long-run marriage wage premiums exceed conventional short-run estimates.     

The construction of maternal identity among Israeli mothers who are welfare clients

Dominant social, cultural, and professional discourses view motherhood as the core of a woman's identity. Thus, the identity of women who do not meet the general expectations of motherhood might be negatively affected. Specifically, mothers who are welfare clients may violate the prevailing norms concerning the maternal role. This qualitative study explores how Israeli mothers who are welfare clients construct their maternal identity. Studies of mothers who are clients of welfare services suggest that they feel blamed for being “bad” or “unfit” mothers. However, women occasionally negotiate or challenge the negative perceptions that are forced on them by hegemonic discourses of motherhood. We postulate that such women experience a troubled maternal identity that they negotiate through interactions with others. Accordingly, this study set to explore how Israeli mothers who are welfare clients negotiate their maternal identity in the context of motherhood and welfare discourses. Fourteen participants were interviewed, and the findings illustrate the vulnerability of the mothers and their strategies to construct a positive maternal identity. We discuss the findings in light of the concept of troubled identity.     

ORTHOGONAL INFORMATION STRUCTURES—A MODEL TO EVALUATE THE INFORMATION PROVIDED BY A SECOND OPINION

The paper discusses the value of information when a number of independent sources provide information related to a common set of states of nature. The starting point is the information economic model of information structures. The model is augmented to represent independence of informational sources by means of orthogonality of the information structures. A new mathematical operator, orthogonal product, is defined and its properties are probed. It is shown that this operator maintains some mathematical properties such as closure, association, unity element, null element, and so forth. It is demonstrated how the orthogonal product represents the notion of multisource information. The paper proves that an orthogonal product is generally more informative than its multipliers, namely, if cost is not considered a constraining factor, then there is a nonnegative value to obtaining a second opinion. An appendix to the paper expands this result to a case of partially dependent signals. The paper concludes with a numerical example and a discussion of the model's applicability for practical problems such as cost estimates.     

COMPARATIVE EVALUATION OF INFORMATION UNDER TWO BUSINESS OBJECTIVES

Information economics models evaluate the value of information under the assumption that decision makers wish to maximize their expected payoff. This assumption has been criticized for not being realistic enough since decision makers usually consider more than one business objective and might be satisficers rather than optimizers. This paper attempts to apply an information economics model to decision situations where two business performance criteria, expected payoff and risk, are considered. In order to overcome the difficulty of unknown trade-off between the two criteria, one criterion is used as an objective to be optimized, while the other is set as a constraint. This may be interpreted as a combination of optimizing and satisficing approaches. It is shown how an information system can be evaluated in terms of both expected payoff and risk. The model suggests the trade-off between the two criteria as an additional trait of an information system. In the last part of the paper, a numerical example illustrates how a comparative evaluation of information structures is performed when risk minimization and expected payoff maximization are concurrently used as business performance criteria.     

A COMPARISON OF INFORMATION STRUCTURES FOR A RIGID DECISION RULE CASE

The information economics model of individual decision assumes that decision makers are capable of instantly modifying their decision rules in response to signal changes from the information structure. Individuals, however, often tend to stick to rigid decision rules, particularly when they are trained to respond with conditioned reactions, such as to a traffic light. This article modifies the individual decision model for such cases. It discusses probabilistic information structures as well as the deterministic information function. It results in an ordering of information structures that differs from the ordering imposed by the Blackwell Theorem. When deterministic information functions are considered, an ordering that is finer than the prevailing one is proposed. Transformations between deterministic and probabilistic information functions and the relationship between the proposed model and the previous theory are also discussed.