the male marital wage premium sorting vs differential pay the authors examine whether male marital and parenthood premia arise due to differential pay by employers or from differential sorting of employees on occupations and establishments they investigate these premia using matched employee employer data from the period 1979 96 in norway a country with increased pressures on men to be more active in the family sphere and in which public policy has aimed at remaking the family institution we find that the effect of marriage and to a lesser extent of children occurs mostly through sorting on occupations and occupation establishment units the role of differential pay from employers is marginal in explaining the marital and parenthood premia results assessing within individual changes in wages suggest that about 80 of the marital premium is due to selection the men who eventually marry and or have children sort into the higher paying occupations and occupation establishment units even prior to marriage and parenthood

does the gap in family friendly policies drive the family gap a segregation of the labour market into a family friendly and a non family friendly sector has the effect that women self select into the sectors depending on institutional constraints preferences for family friendly working conditions and expected wage differences we find that neglecting the sector dimension tends to understate the effect of birth related interruptions in both sectors the combined effect of a large depreciation effect and no recovery means that females in the non family friendly sector e g private sector are punished severely after childbirth in the family friendly sector e g public sector we find complete catch up

beauty premium and marriage premium in search equilibrium theory and empirical test we propose a theoretical explanation for the so called beauty premium our approach relies entirely on search frictions and the fact that physical appearance plays an important role in attracting a marriage partner we analyze the interaction between frictional labor and marriage markets making use of what we label constrained job search the optimal strategy entails different reservation wages for different men and we establish the existence of a search equilibrium characterized by a beauty premium and or marriage premium predicted profiles of premia allow for potential falsification tests and point to relevant empirical evidence in support of our theory

retrospectives classical family values ending the poor laws as they knew them poor law reform in the early 1830s provides a key example of the deep conflicts between classical liberal principles of self reliance and the realities of dependency eminent economists such as nassau senior and thomas malthus argued that the dependency of women and children calls forth and motivates its own support from the altruism of husbands and fathers like modern welfare reformers the classical economists asserted the natural necessity and sufficiency of such dependency and ignored its powerful implications for the intergenerational perpetuation of a highly illiberal inequality of opportunity

does corporate governance influence earnings management in latin american markets although us and european research has documented improvement in earnings quality associated with corporate governance characteristics the situation in latin america is questionable given the business environment in which firms operate which is characterized by controlling family ownership and weak legal protection the purpose of this study is to examine the relation between the internal mechanisms of corporate governance and earnings management measured by discretionary accrual we use a sample of listed latin american non financial companies from the period 2006 2009 our results show how in the latin american context the role of external directors is limited and that boards which meet more frequently take a more active position in the monitoring of insiders so showing a lower use of manipulative practices in addition we find a non linear relation between insider ownership and discretionary accruals also pointing to the fact that ownership concentration may be a manipulative practices constrictor mechanism only when the ownership of main shareholders is moderate the findings have important policy implications since this is to the best of our knowledge the first study to analyze the relation between the effectiveness of the government and the earnings management behavior as policy implications we document how when a country implements controls aimed at reducing corruption strengthening the rule of law or improving the effectiveness of government this leads to a reduction in firm earnings management

does marriage really make men more productive this paper presents new descriptive evidence regarding marital pay premiums earned by white males longitudinal data indicate that wages rise after marriage and that cross sectional marriage premiums appear to result from a steepening of the earnings profile data from a company personnelfile that includes information on job grades and supervisor performance ratings reveal large marital status pay differences within a narrow range of occupations managers and professionals and environments a single firm married workers tend to be located in higher paying job grades there are very small pay differentials within grades married men receive higher performance ratings than single men as a result they are much more likely to be promoted controlling for rated performance however eliminates the promotion differential sanders korenman is an assistant professor of economics and public affairs at princeton university and is a faculty associate of the office of population research at princeton university and a research affiliate of the national bureau of economic research nber david neumark is an assistant professor of economics at the university of pennsylvania and a research affiliate of the nber korenman wishes to acknowledge the hewlett foundation and the harvard university center for population studies for financial support the authors are grateful to james medofffor making available an extract from the company personnelfile questions regarding data availability should be directed to professor james

effects of family background on earnings and returns to schooling evidence from brazil we investigate whether omitted family background variables are responsible for high returns to schooling estimated in brazil returns to schooling fall by about one third when parental schooling is added to wage equations surprisingly the schooling of fathers in law has larger effects on wages than the schooling of fathers on the basis of a model of assortative mating we interpret this as evidence that parental characteristics represent unobservable worker attributes rather than nepotism in the labor market we conclude that the family background bias in returns to schooling is modest and need not imply returns to family connections

local employment impact of growth centres evidence from india evidence regarding non tax incentives is sparse to promote industrialisation in the backward areas of the country growth centres providing infrastructure incentives to enable the states to attract industries were set up by india in 1988 the impact of gcs on unemployment is examined accounting for the simultaneity of gc status the findings are that the change in population of a district and its growth potential are significant in determining actual gc status the impact of demographic and socioeconomic factors on changes in a district s unemployment is studied the novel finding for a developing country is that it is not demand for labour but the supply of labour represented by population that is the constraint in reducing the unemployment rate

are those paid more really more productive the case of experience this study uses computerized personnel microdata on the white male managerial and professional employees at a major u s corporation to address the following question can the additional earnings which are associated with more labor market experience at a point in time really be explained by higher productivity at the same point in time our answer to this question based on both cross sectional and longitudinal information is that performance plays a substantially smaller role in explaining cross sectional experience earnings differentials and earnings growth than is claimed by those who have adopted the human capital explanation of the experience earnings profile this response depends critically on our assumption that the performance ratings which supervisors give to their white male managerial and professional subordinates adequately reflect the subordinates relative productivity in the year of assessment we present a great deal of evidence which strongly supports this assumption

the accumulation of human capital during marriage by males married males have significantly higher wage rates than never married widowed or divorced males even when differences in educational attainment experience race and so on are controlled for evidence presented in this paper suggests that most of the unexplained wage differential associated with marital status in earnings regressions results from males accumulating human capital more rapidly when they are married than when those same males are not married the hypothesis that married males earn more than unmarried males because marriage facilitates the financing of human capital accumulation is supported by this and other evidence

new roles for marriage in urban africa kinship networks and the labor market in kenya abstract this paper explores new roles that traditionally rural kinship networks organized around the marriage institution might play in improving labor market outcomes in urban africa using new data from kisumu kenya and controlling for selection into marriage we find that marriage significantly increases employment levels and incomes in our sample of migrants at the same time marriage increases the remittances that migrants send to the extended family consistent with the view that the benefits of the network come with additional social obligations these obligations appear to be borne disproportionately by high ability individuals who consequently defer marriage the negative selection into marriage that we uncover has consequences for the future viability of the urban networks with implications for long term growth and distribution in this economy

male marital wage differentials training personal characteristics and fixed effects i introduction there is substantial evidence that married white men earn between 8 and 15 more than unmarried white men in the united states even after controlling for education and informal job market experience e g potential or actual experience cross section analysis indicates that both the level and the growth rate of wages increase during marriage these results suggest that men may become more productive after marriage an effect often attributed to the increased specialization possible following the formation of a multiperson household however panel estimates indicate that much of the differential is explained by individual specific fixed effects which suggest that more productive men are more likely to marry while these results and implications are well known the precise nature of the implied productivity differentials has received little attention in the literature using the 1979 cohort of the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy79 we investigate the structure or source of the observed differential we do so by first extending the analysis to a sample of african american men in the united states to our knowledge ours is the first study to conduct a detailed analysis of the marital wage gap among african american men that is fully comparable to that already available for white men this extension is informative because african american households are known to exhibit less specialization along gender lines and because marital patterns are quite different by race next we explore formal job training as one avenue to productivity enhancement we outline a simple story suggesting that married men may be more receptive to training opportunities than unmarried men and present some evidence suggesting that firms may be more willing to offer training to married as compared to unmarried men previous analysis has focused on labor market experience or years married as proxies for both informal and formal job training we significantly improve upon this by using direct information on formal job training to see if wage changes at or following the time of marriage are driven by training induced productivity differentials third we explore the nature of the selection effect or the possibility that it is more productive men who marry the nlsy79 has an extensive array of information on personal characteristics that might be associated with both marriage and earnings if certain personal characteristics are associated with both marriage and earnings but not typically included in wage analyses then the marital controls in standard wage equations may simply be proxying for these characteristics controlling for such characteristics directly should identify the nature of the selection effect and reduce the significance of the marital indicators in cross section estimates the attributes we examine include cognitive skills parental background and personality traits our final contribution is to estimate panel models to eliminate all observable and unobservable individual specific time invariant factors and to reconcile these results with those obtained from cross section models specifically we exploit the different identification conditions between panel and cross section models examining the role of respondents who are always married never married or always separated divorced technically such individuals contribute to the identification of the cross section but not the panel estimates of the marital wage differential thus these individuals may explain the substantial differences often observed between panel and cross section estimates of the white male marital wage differential ii literature review evidence of the marital wage differential for white men in the united states is extensive see ribar 2004 for a review some of this differential has been attributed to a selection effect to the fact that men who marry earn more throughout their lives than men who do not marry

labor immobility and the formation of gender wage gaps in local markets family ties have an important effect on the wage gap between male and female workers because wives are often more geographically tied to their husband s location which may not be the best market for the wife s skills theory implies a testable inverse relationship between urban size reflecting labor market size and male female wage differentials our results indicate that the wage gap between married men and women narrows with urban size about 17 percent of the wage gap between married men and women can be accounted for by urban size or more fundamentally by geographic immobility due to the family tie constraint

household specialization and the male marriage wage premium empirical research has consistently shown that married men have substantially higher wages on average than otherwise similar unmarried men one commonly cited hypothesis to explain this pattern is that marriage allows one spouse to specialize in market production and the other to specialize in home production enabling the former usually the husband to acquire more market specific human capital and ultimately earn higher wages the authors test this hypothesis using panel data from the national survey of families and households the data reveal that married men spent virtually the same amount of time on home production as did single men albeit on different types of housework estimates from a fixed effects wage equation indicate that the male marriage wage premium is not substantially affected by controls for home production activities household specialization the authors conclude does not appear to have been responsible for the marriage premium in this sample

the effects of sons and daughters on men s labor supply and wages in this paper we estimate the effects of children and the differential effects of sons and daughters on men s labor supply and hourly wage rates the responses to fatherhood of two cohorts of men from the psid sample are examined separately and we use fixed effects estimation to control for unobserved heterogeneity we find that fatherhood significantly increases the hourly wage rates and annual hours of work for men from both cohorts most notably men s labor supply and wage rates increase more in response to the births of sons than to the births of daughters

status variables in fixed effect models abstract a merely technical application of fixed effects models without considering the unique meaning of each status variable can yield incomplete and biased results this point is demonstrated by reestimating published results of the effect of marital status or earnings

the gender gap in earnings at career entry we propose a new approach to analyzing gender differences in wages this approach identifies several alternative explanatory mechanisms to account for the sorting of women and men into different types of jobs that offer different levels of reward because labor market rewards derive from labor market positions we study matching processes operating at the micro level that sort workers into existing slots in a given macro level structure of jobs and associated wages we focus on the explanation of gender differences in wages at career entry analyzing data from the national longitudinal survey of youth collected between 1979 and 1991 we find that at career entry women earn 84 cents for every dollar men earn gender differences in worker characteristics account for only about 30 percent of this wage gap gender differences in occupational aspirations have the most important effect accounting for 16 percent of the wage gap and gender differences in job related skills and credentials account for about 14 percent of the wage gap gender differences in adult family roles have little direct effect our analysis further suggests that the external influences of employing organizations and network processes on gender differences in occupational and industrial placement at career entry account for another 42 percent of the wage gap t is well established that in the united states on average women s wages are lower than those of men data on the 1992 annual earnings of full time year round workers ages 16 and older indicate that on average women earned 71 cents for every dollar earned by men u s bureau of the census 1993 we analyze gender differences in wages at career entry when market con

sex discrimination and women s labor market outcomes the human capital explanation of sex differences in wages is that owing to specialization in household production women intend to work in the labor market more intermittently than men and therefore invest less leading to lower wage growth an alternative feedback hypothesis is that women experience labor market discrimination and respond with career interruptions less investment and lower wage growth this paper explores the relationship between self reported discrimination and subsequent labor market outcomes to test this alternative hypothesis some of the evidence is consistent with the feedback hypothesis working women who report discrimination are more likely subsequently to change employers to have children and to marry however the evidence is not consistent with the two implications of the feedback hypothesis that most directly challenge the human capital explanation of sex differences in wages women who report discrimination do not accumulate less experience nor do they have lower wage growth

fertility and childlessness in the united states we develop a theory of fertility distinguishing its intensive margin from its extensive margin the deep parameters are identified using facts from the 1990 us census i fertility of mothers decreases with education ii childlessness exhibits a u shaped relationship with education iii the relationship between marriage rates and education is hump shaped for women and increasing for men we estimate that 2 5 percent of women were childless because of poverty and 8 1 percent because of high opportunity cost of childrearing over time historical trends in total factor productivity and in education led to a u shaped response in childlessness rates while fertility of mothers decreased

the structure of disadvantage individual and occupational determinants of the black white wage gap this study is motivated by the idea that the racial gap in earnings is generated not only by individual differences but also by systematic variation in the occupational structure that attenuates or exacerbates the effects of race using data from the 1990 census and the dictionary of occupational titles a hierarchical linear modeling approach is employed that allows the simultaneous exploration of the mechanisms of income inequality operating both within and between occupations among private sector employees striking evidence shows that racial disparities increase in both absolute and percentage terms as one moves up the occupational earnings hierarchy the association between average occupational earnings and within occupation racial disadvantage reveals an overlooked source of racial earnings inequality which constrains the opportunities available to upwardly mobile black men in the private sector this association cannot be explained by measured individual characteristics or by the status demographic composition or skill demands of occupations in the public sector on the other hand racial inequality in earnings is not systematically associated with average occupational earnings and is instead more closely tied to individual human capital and occupational placement the implications of these results are considered and directions for future research are suggested

marital status child rearing and earnings differentials in the graduate labour market differential the importance of family role specialisation for the measurement of the residual earnings differential is examined within a sample selection model of participation and earnings the earnings differential between men and women may be divided into that explained by different characteristics and attributes and that due to residual factors one element of this residual may be discrimination although other factors may be incorporated in the unexplained component the residual also incorporates the effects on earnings associated with the production of home goods see polachek ig75 a b these will occur

new evidence on sex segregation and sex differences in wages from matched employee employer data we use new matched employer employee data to estimate the contributions of sex segregation and wage differences by sex within occupation industry establishment and occupation establishment cells to the overall sex gap in wages in contrast to earlier data used to study this question our data cover all industries and occupations across all regions of the united states we find that segregation of women into lower paying occupations industries establishments and occupations within establishments accounts for a sizable fraction of the sex gap in wages nonetheless approximately one half of the sex gap in wages remains attributable to the individual s sex

unobservable individual effects marriage and the earnings of young men i introduction married men earn more than unmarried men this fact is unassailable and is robust across data sets and over time two common explanations of the married male wage premium are i the division of labor in a married household which allocates more of the man s time to the market and ii lower cost human capital acquisition for married men both of these stories view marriage as productivity enhancing kenny 1983 provides some evidence that marriage facilitates human capital acquisition however the potential endogeneity of marital status is ignored furthermore the argument that marriage makes it cheaper to accumulate human capital is difficult to reconcile with the fact that individuals who acquire more formal education tend to marry later than those who acquire less bergstrom and schoeni 1992 an alternative explanation for the marriage premium is that marriage signals certain unobservable individual characteristics such as ability honesty loyalty dependability and determination that are valued in both the labor and marriage markets l although i and ii are quite different in terms of their behavioral content they do share a common thread whether marriage per se increases productivity or high productivity men are more likely to be married marital status should not be treated as an exogenous determinant of the wage rate nevertheless in most wage regressions that control for marital status it is assumed to be exogenous resulting in an estimated marriage premium that is biased upward two exceptions are nakosteen and zimmer 1987 and korenman and neumark 1991 although both papers base their empirics on samples of young men they come to very different conclusions regarding the size and source of the marriage premium nakosteen and zimmer find the marriage premium to be insignificantly different from zero and claim that marriage does not make men more productive korenman and neumark kn present evidence that the marriage premium is at least 15 and rises with years married indicating that marriage may be productivity enhancing in this paper we reexamine the empirical relationship between marriage and wages using a sample drawn from the 1971 1976 1978 and 1980 waves of the national longitudinal survey of young men nlsym our data set is an extension of the one used by kn whose empirical work is based on the 1976 1978 and 1980 waves of the nlsym 2 our results may be summarized as follows estimates of the marriage premium derived from fixed effects models which control for unobserved heterogeneity are uniformly smaller than those obtained from random effects models and other cross section approaches that do not specification tests reject the latter and suggest that the individual effects are positively correlated with both marriage and wages conditional on labor market experience job tenure and year effects time spent in marriage has no significant effect on wages this stands as evidence against any dynamic productivity enhancing effect of marriage we conclude that whatever the source the marriage premium is a pure intercept shift and no more than 5 to 7 further support for this conclusion comes from the relationship between prospective marriage and wages using our longer panel we construct a to be married variable which identifies men who marry sometime during the sample period men who are not married in 1971 but who will be earn at least as much as those who are already married finally an interesting related result is the robust and significant effect of children on wages conditional on marital status and years married the presence of children raises wages about 5 regardless of the estimator employed we interpret the effects of marriage and children on wages similarly as structural breaks in the wage generating process involving adjustments in market work and homework among other things

is there a wage bonus from drinking unobserved heterogeneity examined while the result that drinkers earn more than abstainers has been remarkably persistent only one paper in the literature on drinking and earnings has been written where individual fixed effects are included this study improves the current literature by utilizing a much longer panel and focuses on the low end of drinking while controlling for unobserved heterogeneity with the inclusion of individual specific effects it is found that while ols specifications yield a positive significant coefficient on current drinking even when a rich set of covariates is controlled for including individual fixed effects renders the coefficient statistically insignificant

household consumption when the marriage is stable we develop a novel framework to analyze the structural implications of the marriage market for household consumption we de ne a revealed preference characterization of e cient household consumption when the marriage is stable stability means that the marriage matching is individually rational and has no blocking pairs we characterize stable marriage with intrahousehold consumption transfers but without assuming transferable utility we show that our revealed preference characterization generates testable conditions even with a single consumption observation per household and heterogeneous individual preferences across households the characterization also allows for identifying the intrahousehold decision structure including the sharing rule under the same minimalistic assumptions an application to dutch household data demonstrates the usefulness of our theoretical results we nd that the female gets a higher income share when her relative wage increases which we can give a structural interpretation in terms of outside options from marriage that vary with individual wages

why the gender gap in wages narrowed in the 1980s since 1976 the gender gap in wages on average declined by about 1 per year this article focuses on identifying the factors underlying this trend three data sets are analyzed the current population survey the panel study of income dynamics and the national longitudinal survey we find that convergence in measurable work related characteristics schooling and work experience explains one third to one half the narrowing the remainder is attributable to a relative increase in women s returns to experience as well as to declining wages in blue collar work and other factors

intermarriage and the labor market outcomes of asian women the impact of intermarriage with natives on labor market outcomes of immigrants is not homogeneous across ethnic groups wages of asian women are compared with non asians both ordinary least squares and instrumental variables estimates of the effects of intermarriage on the wages of asian women are negative and significant non asian women earn a wage premium that becomes insignificant when controls for selection into marriage are introduced one possible explanation for the intermarriage penalty for asians is an income effect of having a high earning native husband intermarriage penalties rise with husband s education assimilation patterns of intermarried asians indicate that they have lower initial wages market hours and employment but exhibit faster rates of growth over their years of stay the results are robust across asian subgroups and husband s ethnicity jel j16 j12 j31 j61

why does spousal education matter for earnings assortative mating and cross productivity spousal education is correlated with earnings for two reasons cross productivity between couples and assortative mating this article empirically disentangles the two effects by using chinese twins data we have two innovations using twins data to control for the unobserved mating effect in our estimations and estimating both current and wedding time earnings equations we find that both crossproductivity and mating are important in explaining the current earnings although the mating effect exists for both husbands and wives the cross productivity effect mainly runs from chinese husbands to wives our findings shed light on the theories of human capital marriage and the family

monopsony mobility and sex differences in pay missouri school teachers we examine the sex differences in the pay of school teachers in missouri in missouri school districts pay is determined by a salary schedule that maps teaching experience and education level of an individual to a salary level in spite of this apparently mechanical rule for determining pay female teachers earn less than male teachers after controlling for experience and education we explore how such a difference could arise from differential job mobility and find some evidence to support this idea however within district differences in pay are a more important source of differences in pay between men and women

understanding young women s marriage decisions the role of labor and marriage market conditions using the 1970 1980 1990 censuses the authors investigate the impact of labor and marriage market conditions on the incidence of marriage of young women age 16 24 they first estimate the effects on marriage of personal characteristics and metropolitan statistical area msa indicators separately by race and education group they then regress the first stage msa effects on msa level labor and marriage market conditions and welfare benefits taking account of fixed effects and time trends specific to each msa better female labor markets worse female marriage markets worse male labor markets are found to lower marriage rates fr whites in all education groups results for these variables for blacks are sensitive to estimation technique although stronger results are obtained for an older age group 25 34 while welfare benefits have a negative effect in cross sectional analyses the association becomes considerably weaker in fixed effects specifications

the marriage earnings premium as a distributed fixed effect wage equations using cross sectional data typically find an earnings premium in excess of 10 percent for married men one leading hypothesis for the premium is that marriage facilitates specialization that enables married men to become more productive than single men another is that the premium is attributable to an unobserved fixed effect married men possessing qualities that are valued in the labor market as well as the marriage market this paper suggests that the premium is attributable to an unobserved timedistributed fixed effect that emerges and grows with the approach of marriage and continues to grow for some years after marriage a similar distributed fixed effect is found in the case of women but it is smaller and declines after a few years of marriage the results appear to cast doubt on the specialization hypothesis

marital status and earnings of young men a model with endogenous selection it is a matter of course in applied labor economics to presume that marital status is a predetermined contributor to earnings among young males we find no evidence to support that proposition we estimate a model of earnings determination that permits endogenous selection of marital status our estimates are based on a sample of young employed males from the michigan panel survey of income dynamics they indicate that marital status viewed in this manner does not significantly shift the mean earnings profile our sensitivity tests indicate that this conclusion is robust with respect to a variety of alternative specifications excerpt

the wage effects of cumulative job mobility this analysis of data from the national longitudinal survey of youth shows that cumulative job mobility had statistically significant effects on wages in the years 1979 88 the direction of the wage effects positive or negative and their magnitude varied depending on the type of cumulative mobility examined employee initiated versus employerinitiated separations economic versus family related quits layoffs versus discharges the results also indicate that although men and women had different mobility histories men for example had been discharged more often than women and women had quit for family related reasons more often than men the wage effects of each type of cumulative mobility economic quits family related quits layoffs and discharges were similar for men and women tn this paper we examine the impact of cumulative job mobility on the subsequent wages of young men and women most previous work on this subject has focused on the impact of specific mobility events such as quits or layoffs rather than on the impact of total job history on wages researchers looking at single mobility decisions have consistently reported evidence that a change in employers does affect a worker s subsequent wage therefore it is reasonable to ask whether the impact ofjob change is cumulative that is does a worker s current wage reflect the impact of all past mobility decisions quits layoffs and discharges also since most of the

consumption and habits evidence from panel data the purpose of this paper is to test for the presence of habit formation in consumption decisions using household panel data we use the test proposed by meghir and weber 1996 and estimate the within period marginal rate of substitution between commodities which is robust to the presence of liquidity constraints to that end we use a spanish panel data set in which households are observed up to eight consecutive quarters this temporal dimension is crucial since it allows us to take into account time invariant unobserved heterogeneity across households fixed effects and therefore to investigate if the relationship between current and past consumption reflects habits or heterogeneity our results confirm the importance of accounting for fixed effects when analyzing intertemporal consumption decisions allowing for time non separabilities once fixed effects are controlled for and a proper set of instruments is used the results yield supporting evidence of habit formation in the demand system of food at home transport and services

family ties and labor markets in the united states and brazil we use comparable surveys from brazil and the united states to examine vertical and horizontal connections between families motivated by a model of assortative mating and intergenerational transmission of schooling and earnings we include the schooling of relatives in male wage equations we find that the effect offather in law s schooling is larger than the effect offather s schooling in brazil while the opposite is observed in the united states we interpret these effects as indicators of unobservable worker characteristics with differences in assortative mating and female labor market activity explaining the differences in the apparent effect of fathers and fathers in law in the two countries

the impact of employer provided health insurance on dynamic employment transitions we estimate the impact of employer provided health insurance ephi on the job mobility of males over time using a dynamic empirical model that accounts for unobserved heterogeneity previous studies of job lock reach different conclusions about possible distortions in labor mobility stemming from an employment based health insurance system a few authors find no evidence of job lock although most find reductions in the mobility of insured workers of between 20 and 40 percent we use data from the national longitudinal survey of youth which includes variables describing the health insurance an individual holds as well as whether he is offered insurance by his employer this additional information allows us to model the latent individual characteristics that are correlated with the offer of ephi the acceptance of ephi and employment transitions our results provide an estimate of job lock unbiased through correlation with positive job characteristics and individual specific turnover propensity we find no evidence of job lock among married males and produce small estimates of job lock among unmarried males of between 10 and 15 percent

are all the good men married uncovering the sources of the marital wage premium a longstanding and yet unsettled question in labor economics is does marriage cause men s wages to rise cross sectional wage studies consistently find that married men earn significantly higher wages than do men who are not currently married however it is well known that inferring causal relationships from crosssectional analysis is inappropriate because of the biases introduced by unobserved heterogeneity as a means of circumventing this problem this paper uses data on identical twins to control for unobserved heterogeneity our estimates suggest that marriage increases men s wages by as much as 27 and that little if any of the cross sectional relationship between marriage and wages is due to selection in addition we find little evidence that the marital wage premium is a consequence of household specialization

12 million salaried workers are missing evidence from current population surveys various cohorts of the national longitudinal surveys and the panel study of income dynamics suggests that the fraction of american employees who were paid salaries held constant from the late 1960s through the late 1970s and continued to hold constant or perhaps fell slightly thereafter through the late 1990s an analysis that accounts for the changing industrial occupational demographic and economic structure of the work force shows that this fraction was 9 percentage points below what would have been expected in the late 1970s this shortfall is not explained by growth in the temporary help industry declining unionization institutional changes in overtime or wage payment regulation the increasing openness of american labor and product markets or convergence of nonwage aspects of hourly and salaried employment the author suggests several alternative explanations

why do married men earn more productivity or marriage selection injae lee using data from the current population survey march supplement 1999 this study examines why married men earn more than men who have never married we find that the marriage wage premium cannot be attributed to the unobservable higher earnings capability of married men instead wage gains from marriage are explained by the degree of specialization within the household our findings cast doubt on the argument that the selection of high ability men into marriage is the cause of the marriage wage premium jel j12 j31 i introduction labor economists have devoted considerable effort to explaining why married men earn higher wages than men who have never married a number of theoretical hypotheses have been advanced to explore the nature of this marriage wage premium the dominant theory is the productivity hypothesis which argues that marriage makes men more productive becker 1991 married men have greater opportunities to specialize in labor market activities when their wives specialize in home production the marriage wage premium reflects a productivity gap between married and never married men stemming from different conditions for human capital accumulation in market work a competing argument is the selection hypothesis nakosteen and zimmer 1987 1997 this reverses the direction of causality proposing that men with a higher earnings capability are valued more in the marriage market and are thus more likely to marry the marriage premium mirrors the marriage selection pattern married men are more productive not because they become more productive after marriage but because they were more productive before marriage 1 while there is compelling evidence that married men have higher earnings than never married men hill 1979 the relative merits of the productivity and selection arguments in explaining the existence of the marriage premium remain to be established nakosteen and zimmer 1987 argue that the marriage premium is a statistical artifact arising from a sorting process in which high wage males tend to be selected into marriage when selection effects are accounted for in their wage regression the marriage premium remains numerically large but becomes statistically insignificant however korenman and neumark 1991 show that the selection hypothesis is an incomplete explanation of the marriage premium they find that less than one half of the marriage premium vanishes when unobservable individual factors affecting both wages and marriage are removed the remaining premium is interpreted as the productivity enhancing effects of marriage later studies examine the validity of the productivity explanation using measures for the household division of labor such as a wife s labor market hours and the number of children in the household the studies investigate the effects of household specialization on a husband s earnings according to the productivity hypothesis men whose wives specialize in home production should have a larger premium than men whose wives work in the labor market the evidence for this is mixed daniel 1992 and gray 1997 find that the marriage premium is negatively associated with the wife s labor market hours whereas loh 1996 and jacobsen and rayack 1996 find little evidence that the marriage premium is explained by productivity differences past work tries to clarify the relationship between marriage household specialization and a husband s earnings but it does not allow us to reach an empirical consensus about the cause of the marriage premium in this article we present a new empirical framework to test the relative merits of two competing but not mutually exclusive hypotheses first we develop a switching regression model with endogenous marriage selection the selection hypothesis is founded on the premise that a man s attractiveness as a potential mate depends upon his observed earnings as well as unobservable individual traits that are positively related to his earnings potential

drive and talent we analyze ways in which heterogeneity in responsiveness to incentives drive affects employees incentives and firms incentive systems in a career concerns model on the one hand because more driven agents work harder in response to existing incentives than less driven ones and therefore pay is increasing in perceived drive there is a motive to increase effort to signal high drive these drive signaling incentives are strongest with intermediate levels of existing incentives on the other hand because past output of a more driven agent will seem to the principal to reflect lower ability there is an incentive to decrease effort to signal low drive the former effect dominates early in the career and the latter effect dominates towards the end to maximize incentives the principal wants to observe a noisy measure of the agent s effort such as the number of hours he works early but not late in his career jel c70 d82 d23

spouse selection and earnings evidence of marital sorting michael a zimmer this article investigates economic bases for individuals selection of marriage partners its central focus is matching of spouse pairs based on unobservable components of hourly earnings using a data extract from the panel study of income dynamics we have observations of individuals wages before and immediately after marriage along with their spouses earnings after marriage we exploit the data to estimate the relation between spouses wage residuals the evidence supports positive marital matching on the basis of earnings the results are robust with respect to variations in the statistical framework of the model jel j12 i introduction the process by which marriages are formed has long attracted the attention of social scientists research has suggested that individuals choose spouses similar to themselves in physical and social traits such as height and ethnicity an area of interest in recent years has been the economic basis of spouse selection beginning with becker 1974 economists focused on earnings characteristics of spouses becker argued that since in most cultures males specialize in market production spouse selection matches high wage males with females who specialize in home production and rearing of families empirical research on becker s hypothesis has produced mixed results in several studies the strategy has been to estimate earnings regressions from samples of existing married couples and then obtain correlations between the ensuing earnings residuals of spouses the correlations are used as indexes of marital sorting in earnings after controlling for measured factors such as schooling age and work experience smith 1979 used census data to estimate residual correlations for black and white couples he obtained estimates of 0 035 for whites and 0 216 for blacks becker 1981 used the 1967 survey of economic opportunity to obtain partial correlations of 0 32 for whites and 0 24 for blacks zimmer 1996 examined earnings correlations among low income marriages although his evidence supports becker s hypothesis of negative assortative mating with respect to wages the results are not consistent across race groups lam 1988 provided an explanation of positive assortative mating with respect to wealth and wages be also established elasticities of spouses hours worked and demands for household goods with respect to wages that would produce positive assortative mating several recent studies have addressed the apparent earnings premium of married males relative to single males nakosteen and zimmer 1997 and cornwell and rupert 1997 argued that married men are observed to earn more than singles because high earning males possess unobserved traits that make them attractive prospects for marriage but here too the evidence is mixed korenmann and neumark 1991 suggested that married males earn more than singles because marriage tends to make them more productive thereby enhancing their earnings prospects these studies have not paid attention to assortative mating per se focusing instead on earnings of husbands in the single versus married state the purpose of this study is to return to the issue of spouse matching on the basis of earnings our empirical strategy based on several waves of data from the panel study of income dynamics psid differs from the articles first cited above by attempting to capture the earnings residual of one spouse prior to marriage and relating it to the residual of his partner in a period shortly after marriage in this manner we do not rely as heavily on the use of ongoing marriages as in the early studies the following section describes our statistical approach in more detail section iii describes the data and specification of the earnings models sections iv and v present results of estimation and section vi concludes the article our results provide broad support for the hypothesis of positive assortative mating with respect to earnings

specialization then and now marriage children and the gender earnings gap across cohorts in this paper we examine the evolution of the gender gap associated with marriage and parental status comparing cohorts born between 1936 and 1985 the model of household specialization and division of labor introduced by becker posits that when forming households couples will exploit the gains from trade by having one spouse specialize in market work while the other specializes in household work given the historical advantage of men in the labor market the model predicts specialization by gender and therefore an earnings advantage for married men and an earnings disadvantage for married women is this model of specialization useful for understanding the evolution of the gender gap across generations of women and what about children academic papers have shown that wages of mothers are significantly lower than those of non mothers with similar human capital characteristics we do not attempt to build a structural model here but rather document how changing associations between marriage and earnings and between children and earnings have contributed to the gender gap in an accounting sense

the fall in men s return to marriage declining productivity effects or changing selection historically one of the most robust findings from human capital wage equations has been that married men earn more than men who never marry however the earnings premium paid to u s married compared with never married men declined by more than 40 percent during the 1980s data from the national longitudinal surveys young men and youth cohorts are used to explore two competing explanations for this decline changes in the selection of high wage men into marriage and changes in the productivity effects of marriage due to declining specialization within households the results suggest that the drop in the marriage wage premium was due largely to a decline in the productivity effects associated with marriage instrumental variables estimation suggests that these declining productivity effects can be explained by a reduction in the average degree of specialization across households coupled with an increase in the wage penalty associated with wives labor market hours excerpt

marital status and productivity evidence from personnel data although a robust wage premium for married men has been documented extensively in the labor economics literature prior studies have been hampered in testing competing explanations of the premium by a lack of data on worker productivity this study exploits a unique data set that contains job performance measures for employees of a large hierarchical organization the quasi longitudinal data track the marital status and job productivity including performance reviews and promotions of male naval officers in technical and managerial jobs compared with single men married men receive significantly higher performance ratings and are more likely to be promoted in estimates that control for selection arising from quit decisions the size of the marriage productivity effect falls but in most cases remains robust also based on supplementary tests selectivity arising from the decision to marry appears to explain only a small portion of the unadjusted marriage premium for navy officers although the existence of a wage premium for married men has been documented extensively in the labor economics literature the source of the premium has remained controversial one hypothesis attributes the wage differential to economies of scale and specialization within the household which provides incentives for additional investment in specific human capital by married men becker 1981 alternative hypotheses are that the marriage premium stems from employer favoritism or that more productive or higher earning men are selected into marriage the extensive empirical literature that has attempted to test the competing explanations has produced conflicting conclusions however one research approach to assess the effect of marital status that seldom has been implemented in the prior literature is to use data on the realized productivity of employees of a single firm this study uses administrative data on male employees of a large hierarchical organization to explore the effect of marital status on selected job performance measures the personnel database covers male u s naval officers and contains relatively detailed information on career performance including promotion outcomes and annual performance reviews the article seeks to shed light on the existence and magnitude of job productivity differentials between married and single males and to assess competing explanations for marriage related performance differentials navy personnel data are especially fertile for analyzing the effect of marital status on employee job productivity several performance measures are available for each individual and the indicators capture performance throughout an employee s tenure rather than at a single career point the design

is there a male marital wage premium new evidence from the united states this study reconsiders the phenomenon that married men earn more money than unmarried men a key result of the research on marriage benefits many earlier studies have found such a male marital wa

fear and lathing in the michigan furniture industry employee based discrimination a century ago i introduction despite progress made in the conceptualization of labor market discrimination the sources of discrimination continue to elude economists in their empirical investigations d amico 1987 the primary reason for this failure is inadequate data since studying the sources of discrimination demands information on workers institutional settings in particular the examination of employee based discrimination requires information on coworkers attributes in addition to the characteristics of the worker himself because of this direct tests of employee based discrimination in the modern economy are nearly impossible to make most tests must be rather indirect 1 here we attempt to examine the sources of discrimination by focusing on discrimination by fellow employees in an era in which intergroup tensions were important as they are now we link two themes in labor economics by analyzing employee based discrimination as a special example of a compensating wage differential the data from the 1889 michigan bureau of labor annual report on the furniture industry are uniquely suited to the analysis of employee based discrimination because they include information on the individual worker his firm and his coworkers for over 5000 workers and because the workers surveyed come from several ethnic groups using the data we measure the magnitude and character of employee based discrimination as we examine specific aspects of ethnic interaction in the labor market in the late 1800s empirically we find that employee based discrimination was important in this labor market workers of one ethnic group received a higher wage when working with members of other groups wages rose by about 0 1 percent when the proportion of coworkers in the worker s own ethnic group fell by one percentage point this response was greater in small cities small firms and among certain ethnic groups including the american born dutch and poles protestants were generally paid more when working with catholics thus the wage of the furniture worker was determined not only by his ability to lathe but also by fear and other feelings toward his coworkers we close by attempting to measure the additional labor costs generated by employee based discrimination within a multi ethnic work force concluding that they were probably offset by several benefits which rendered complete segregation unnecessary ii model and data our model of the labor market unites becker s 1971 model of employee based discrimination with rosen s 1974 hedonic wage model we assume that employers sell goods in a competitive output market and hire mobile workers in a competitive input market following the hedonic wage model firms make job offers to workers that include both wage and nonwage benefits a worker chooses the wage nonwage benefit bundle to maximize utility the nonwage benefits bundle to which we restrict our attention is the ethnic composition of the firm 2 as the work force of his firm includes more workers whom he likes dislikes the worker s wage should fall rise the data from the seventh annual report of the michigan bureau of labor 1890 include the worker s wage birth place father s birth place and several human capital measures age occupation years of experience in occupation years with present employer a literacy proxy place of residence and marital status for each individual 3 table i shows the characteristics of the american born foreign born and sons of immigrants in the sample the report is organized by firm with the name and location of the firm followed by a list of the employees in the firm containing thirty three pieces of information about each individual 4 therefore it is possible to measure the ethnic characteristics of each worker s fellow employees and the effect of work force composition on the worker s wage iii expectations about employee and employer discrimination 1889 nativism reached a peak in the united states around 1890 and michigan was a center of nativist feeling

two separated effects of employer provided health insurance on job mobility we estimate the effect of employer provided health insurance ephi on job mobility via a dynamic model of joint employment and health insurance decision in the presence of uncertainty about wage rate and health status transitions the model is based on a markov decision process in which a hedonic wage approach provides an economic rationale for the different choices and health insurance serves as an input to the health production process including health transitions in the model helps us to understand how the availability of ephi positive job characteristic and holding ephi the wage health insurance trade off enter into the individuals decisions the model is estimated using the 1999 2000 medical expenditure panel survey panel 4 and the results show that the pure effects of holding ephi are negligible the full effects of ephi are significant and the degrees of the inefficiency vary between 14 and 25 across different states

positive assortative mating and spouses as complementary factors of production a theory of labour augmentation this article develops a model of intellectual labour augmentation to explain both the marriage wage premium and educational assortative mating we suggest that husbands and wives are complementary factors of production where a spouse s education and skills augment their partner s productivity and earnings potential we test this proposition using data from the 2000 us census of population and the 2003 current population survey our results indicate that for working couples the marriage premium for husbands and wives is directly related to the education level of their spouses suggesting that positive assortative mating may be attributable to the labour market effects of intellectual augmentation of married households

accounting for the gender gap in college attainment i introduction one striking phenomenon in the u s labor market is the reversal of the gender gap in college attainment in 1980 57 of young men aged 25 34 compared with 46 of young women had some college education by age 34 by 1996 however female college attainment had reached 64 5 percentage points higher than that of the males in the same cohort in tact females overtook males in college attainment in 1987 and have led ever since a large body of empirical research emphasizes the role of the earnings premium as a key explanatory variable for the determination of education outcomes see e g becket 1967 mincer 1974 willis and rosen 1979 in addition an extensive literature shows that family background is an important determinant of the schooling decision see among others cameron and heckman 1998 2001 eckstein and wolpin 1999 ge 2008 kane 1994 recently several papers have argued empirically and theoretically that expected marriage is important in determining the schooling decision e g chiappori iyigun and weiss 2006 ge 2008 iyigun and walsh 2007 on the basis of this literature we construct a life cycle model that includes potential costs and benefits from the labor market and marriage market which determine individual college decisions in our model individuals with differing learning abilities first decide whether or not to enter college then they might get married and have children parents are altruistic and value their children s learning ability which increases with the parents education forward looking individuals take into account the impact of their own schooling on their children s learning ability other factors that affect an individual s decision on whether to pursue higher education include the expected direct labor market returns to college over one s lifetime the expected marriage market returns to college and the financial and effort costs of attending college these costs and benefits can differ by gender we calculate from panel study of income dynamics psid and current population survey cps parents education distributions the life cycle profiles of single marriage and divorce probabilities by education and the lifecycle profiles of earnings by education and marital status as exogenous inputs of the model we observe that the number of college educated parents increases over time in the marriage market a substantial increase of single probabilities and an increase of divorce probabilities has occurred for both genders regardless of college attainment status lifetime earnings by cohort are decreasing slowly for males of all marital statuses especially for married males lifetime earnings for married and divorced females are increasing gradually whereas those for single females are decreasing slightly to formally endogenize those changes is beyond the scope of our paper we instead focus on the mechanism in which under perfect foresight these changes affect education decisions we estimate the parameters of the model by matching data on college attainment by gender from the psid we present evidence on how well the model fits the data we then use the parameter estimates to simulate counterfactual experiments which break down the sources of changes in college attainment into the effects of changes in relative earnings changes in parental education and changes in the marriage market what accounts for the increase in college attainment over the past few decades we find that the increasing gap in earnings between college and high school graduates has important effects on the increase in college attainment for both genders when earnings are fixed at 1946 cohort levels attainment rates in 1996 drop by 15 5 and 14 2 percentage points for males and females respectively we also emphasize the importance of intergenerational persistence in schooling on the increase in college attainment for both genders

evolution of the marriage earnings gap for women abstract using survey of income and program participation sipp panels linked to social security earnings records we examine the earnings gap associated with marriage for cohorts of women born between 1936 and 1975 we compare ordinary least squares and fixed effect estimates we find that among women who work the marital earnings gap has all but disappeared in fixed effects estimates for recent birth cohorts in fact among women without children married women earn more than single women implying a diminished role for specialization when children are not present in contrast the motherhood earnings gap remains large even for recent birth cohorts

longitudinal analyses of the effects of trade unions but union members are different from nonmembers in unobserved ways biasing your estimates y ou should make a selectivity bias correction simultaneously determine union status and economic outcomes develop an unobservables model use longitudinal data archetypical comment on virtually any study of the economic effects of umomsm or suitably modified on any other empirical subject

examining the wage differential for married and cohabiting men leslie s stratton i introduction wage analyses almost universally indicate that married men earn more than do single men even after controlling for observable human capital characteristics the same appears to be true for cohabiting men research has failed as yet to reach a consensus regarding the nature of these differentials the evidence is consistent with a number of alternative explanations first marriage could increase men s market productivity because economies of scale and increased specialization within a multiperson household give them more time and energy to devote to market related activities if this is the mechanism driving the marital wage differential then cohabiting men may also experience a wage boost albeit a smaller one as cohabitation is a less stable relationship and less likely to engender specialization wages could jump at the start of a relationship but an increased focus on market related activities is more likely to cause wages to rise at a faster pace alternatively men who marry or cohabit may be inher ently different from men who do not if men are selected into relationships based on their earnings ability then cross section wage analyses will indicate a wage differential for married and cohabiting men but difference estimation will not the goal of this analysis is to shed light on the nature of the marital and cohabitation wage premiums for men by estimating wage models that permit both differential wage growth and selection effects ii literature review evidence of a marital wage premium for men abounds a thorough literature review is beyond the scope of this article but incorporation of a marital dummy in wage specifications for men is fairly standard hill 1979 provides one much cited work empirical estimates in the range of 10 to 30 are typical a number of researchers have explored the nature of this wage differential one explanation focuses on the marital decision itself the argument being that men who are inherently more productive are more sought after marriage partners and hence more likely to marry this is the selection model attempts such as that by nakosteen and zimmer 1987 to estimate a model in which marital status and wages are endogenously determined have yielded inconclusive results and are sensitive to identification restrictions an alternative approach less subject to specification error is to estimate a fixed effects specification that eliminates all individual specific time invariant characteristics 1 researchers korenman and neumark 1991 bartlett and callahan 1984 daniel 1991 and gray 1997 have employed this technique and continue to observe a significant marital wage differential indicating that selection effects do not explain the entire differential gray 1997 finds some evidence that the premium has declined over time as he does not find a significant marital wage differential using data from the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy the most recent cohort of data tested however daniel 1991 also uses data from the nlsy and he finds a significant marital wage differential of about the same magnitude as that obtained from older cohorts generally speaking a comparison of cross section and panel results suggests that less than 20 of the marital wage differential is attributable to individual specific components or selectivity if selection alone does not explain the differential then wages must increase following marriage wages could be higher because they jump or because they rise more rapidly following marriage empirical estimates reported by kenny 1983 using the coleman rossi retrospective life histories study and by korenman and neumark 1991 loh 1996 and gray 1997 using the national longitudinal study of young men suggest that the growth rate of wages increases on marriage once again results from the nlsy are mixed with daniel 1991 finding faster wage growth following marriage and gray 1997 finding no marital wage differential

from motherhood penalties to husband premia the new challenge for gender equality and family policy lessons from norway given the key role that processes occurring in the family play in creating gender inequality the family is a central focus of policies aimed at creating greater gender equality we examine how family status affects the gender wage gap using longitudinal matched employer employee data from norway 1979 96 a period with extensive expansion of family policies the motherhood penalty dropped dramatically from 1979 to 1996 among men the premia for marriage and fatherhood remained constant in 1979 the gender wage gap was primarily due to the motherhood penalty but by 1996 husband premia were more important than motherhood penalties

marital matching and earnings evidence from the unmarried population in sweden social scientists have devoted substantial research to economic basis for matching of men and women in marriage a common feature of existing studies is their reliance on samples of married couples the principal shortcoming of spouse data is that spouses earnings correlations are contaminated by the partners behaviors and other events that occur after marriage and affect their earnings this study addresses that problem by exploiting a longitudinal data file from the swedish population by selecting a sample of married couples in a given year we retreat through the file to years before the marriage using data from the spouses single years we apply the correlation methodology to their earnings evidence from the model supports positive assortative mating

gender discrimination without gender difference theory and policy responses abstract this paper provides an explanation for the continued existence of gender discrimination in competitive labour markets and analyzes the effects of policies designed to alleviate it unlike previous explanations of gender discrimination this theory arises from the interaction between women and men within the household and does not rely on inherent asymmetries between women and men even though discrimination is seen to be related to factors which can be thought external to the labour market such as higher job turnover and labour market exit rates for women policies which target only labour market outcomes and do not deal with external factors can both lead to reduced discrimination and also alter external factors thereby reducing discrimination further however policies aimed at external factors will in general be less effective in reducing discrimination unless combined with more direct policies

the accumulation of dis advantage the intersection of gender and race in the long term wage effect of marriage a sizable literature examines whether and why marriage affects men s and women s wages this study advances current research in two ways first whereas most prior studies treat the effect of marri