The Impact of Worker and Establishment‐level Characteristics on Male–Female Wage Differentials: Evidence from Danish Matched Employee–Employer Data

Abstract. This paper uses matched employer–employee data from Denmark to examine how gender segregation at the level of occupation, industry, establishment, and job‐cell impacts the gender wage differential of full‐time, private‐sector salaried and manual workers. Wage effects of gender segregation at the above four levels are estimated through fixed effects or through controls for the proportion females within these structures. We find that occupation has a much larger role than industry or establishment in accounting for the gender gap for salaried but not manual workers, and that for both groups there is a significant within‐job‐cell gender wage differential.     

PERSPECTIVE ARTICLE: The impact of Nordic countries’ family friendly policies on employment,wages, and children

The Nordic countries at the same time exhibit a remarkably high participation rate of mothers and a more moderate decline in fertility rates compared to other Western countries. This has been attributed to the fact that the welfare state model and, especially, the family friendly policies chosen in the Nordic countries are unique. In this paper we evaluate the impact of Nordic countries’ family friendly policies on employment, wages and children’s well-being. We demonstrate that, although the ‘Nordic model’ has been successful in boosting female employment, it is a costly solution. Furthermore, family-friendly policies mainly directed towards giving mothers the right to be on long paid maternal leave have adverse effects on women’s wages with consequences for gender equality. Indeed, extensive family-friendly schemes may even have created a ‘system-based glass ceiling’ hindering women’s career progression. There is no evidence however of a trade-off between family-friendly policies and family welfare as effects on child development and children’s well-being of publicly provided child-care are found to be modest or even positive.

Examining the impact of alternative power measures on individual time use in American and Danish couple households

We exploit time diary data for couple households in Denmark and the United States to examine the impact alternative measures of intrahousehold bargaining power have upon different measures of individual time use. Power measures have traditionally been based on current earnings, but earnings are determined by past/present time use decisions and hence potentially endogenous. More powerful individuals have been hypothesized to spend less time on housework, however, housework time also depends upon relative preferences for home produced goods and relative productivity in home production. Gendered notions of time use and censored earnings and time data also pose problems. We propose examining leisure time and exploring alternative measures of power less prone to endogeneity bias in order to address these theoretical and empirical concerns. Our results indicate that leisure time is more consistently and significantly associated with ‘power’ than housework time and that education share performs quite well as a measure of power. These results are particularly strong on non-work days and in the United States.     

Mothers’ health knowledge for children with diarrhea: who you are or who you know?

Review of Economics of the Household - This paper explores the relationship among Indian mothers’ health knowledge regarding proper treatment of diarrhea in children and caste, religion and...     

Does mother know best? Parental discrepancies in assessing child behavioral and educational outcomes

We investigate the degree of correspondence between parents’ reports on child behavioral and educational outcomes using wave four of a rich Danish longitudinal survey of children (the DALSC). All outcomes are measured at age 11 when the children are expected to be in fifth grade. Once discrepancies are detected, we analyze whether they are driven by noisy evaluations or by systematic bias, focusing on the role of parental characteristics and response heterogeneity. We then explicitly assess the relative importance of the mother’s versus the father’s assessments in explaining child academic performance and diagnosed mental health to investigate whether one parent is systematically a better informant of their child’s outcomes than the other. Our results show that parental psychopathology, measured as maternal distress, is a source of systematic misreporting of child functioning, that the parent–child relationship matters, and that mothers are not necessarily a better informant of child functioning than fathers. This last finding should not only be valid for Denmark but also for many other countries, where the father’s role in childcare has been growing.     

Labour market integration of FRY refugees in Sweden vs. Denmark

We compare the long-run labour market integration of the Former Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) refugees who arrived in the 1990s to the Scandinavian countries in the settings of Sweden and Denmark, respectively. These otherwise similar countries faced different economic conditions at the time of arrival and over the observation period. They also differed in terms of the restrictiveness of asylum policies and in attitudes towards immigration. Using register data from Statistics Sweden and Statistics Denmark, we show that FRY refugees, in both child and adult generations at arrival, are better integrated 12–15 years later in Sweden than in Denmark, even though Sweden experienced a higher level of unemployment than Denmark throughout the period. Our findings suggest that asylum policies promoting early labour market entry and early exposure to a host country's schooling system, as well as access to disability pension and social assistance, are important factors affecting refugee labour market integration.