male and female marriage returns to schooling a collective marriage matching model is estimated and calibrated to quantify the share of returns to schooling that is realized through marriage the predictions of the model are matched with detailed danish household data on the relationship between schooling and wage rates the division of time and goods within the household and the extent to which men and women sort positively on several traits in marriage counterfactual analysis conducted with the model suggests that danish men and women are earning on the order of half of their returns to schooling through improved marital outcomes

a simple model of growth cycles with technology choice abstract in this study we develop a simple computable overlapping generations model that exhibits endogenous fluctuations the key assumption is that a firm can choose from multiple technologies of production since the model reduces to a piecewise linear map on the unit interval it allows us to conduct an in depth analysis of its dynamic properties particularly this piecewise linearization reveals the ability of the model to exhibit periodic attracting cycles of an arbitrarily large period as well as non periodic attractors furthermore it is demonstrated that the occurrence of periodic patterns is completely characterized by the rotation number or the devil s staircase

public health spending old age productivity and economic growth chaotic cycles under perfect foresight abstract this paper analyses the dynamics of a double cobb douglas economy with overlapping generations and public health investments that affect the supply of efficient labour of the old aged it is shown that the positive steady state of the economy is unique moreover we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the emergence of endogenous deterministic complex cycles when individuals are perfectly foresighted interestingly i the equilibrium dynamics shows rather complicated phenomena such as a multiplicity of bubblings depending on the size of the public health system and ii the higher the degree of thriftiness the likelier an economy is exposed to endogenous fluctuations because the need to save when young to support consumption when old is reduced

education and income attraction an online dating field experiment abstractprior studies have found a robust correlation in the education of dating and married couples however there is little evidence to suggest that such correlations are causal that is for the sake of relationship public goods such as the pleasures of the enlightened conversations that only a common high level of education might support being empirical studies they cannot rule out couples matching on other characteristics like income height or health which are correlated with education from driving results we contribute to this literature by randomly assigning high and low education and income levels to 388 artificial male and female profiles on a large online dating website in china we then counted thousands of visits clicks on abbreviated profiles which included education and income information from search engine results we found that men s visits to female profiles were unaffected by the profile s assigned education level while women s visits to male profiles increase with the prof

sex and science how professor gender perpetuates the gender gap nber working paper seriessex and science how professor gender perpetuates the gender gapscott e carrellmarianne e pagejames e westworking paper 14959http www nber org papers w14959national bureau of economic research1050 massachusetts avenuecambridge ma 02138may 2009thanks go to usafa personnel j putnam d stockburger r schreiner k carson and p eglestonfor assistance in obtaining the data and to deb west for data entry thanks also go to charlie brown charles clotfelter caroline hoxby deborah niemeier kim shauman catherine weinberger andseminar participants at nber higher education working group ppic sdsu uc davis uc irvine and uc santa cruz for their helpful comments and suggestions the views expressed in this articleare those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the usaf dod the u s government or the national bureau of economic research 2009 by scott e carrell marianne e page and james e west all rights reserved short sectionsof text not to exceed two paragraphs may be quoted without explicit permission provided that fullcredit including notice is given to the source

the math gender gap the role of culture this paper investigates the effect of gender related culture on the math gender gap by analysing math test scores of second generation immigrants who are all exposed to a common set of host country laws and institutions we find that immigrant girls whose parents come from more gender equal countries perform better relative to similar boys than immigrant girls whose parents come from less gender equal countries suggesting an important role of cultural beliefs on the role of women in society on the math gender gap the transmission of cultural beliefs accounts for at least two thirds of the overall contribution of gender related factors

ethnicity neighborhoods and human capital externalities the socioeconomic performance of today s workers depends not only on parental skills but also on the average skills of the ethnic group in the parents generation or ethnic capital this paper investigates the link between the ethnic externality and ethnic neighborhoods the evidence indicates that residential segregation and the external effect of ethnicity are linked partly because ethnic capital summarizes the socioeconomic background of the neighborhood where the children were raised ethnicity has an external effect even among persons who grow up in the same neighborhood when children are exposed frequently to persons who share the same ethnic background copyright 1995 by american economic association

performance gender gap does competition matter using data for students undertaking a series of real world academic examinations with high future payoffs we examine whether the differences in these evaluations competitive nature generate a performance gender gap in the univariate setting we find that women s performance is first order stochastically dominated by that of men when the competition is higher whereas the reverse holds true in the less competitive or noncompetitive tests these results are confirmed in the multivariate setting our findings from a real world setting with important payoffs at stake are in line with the evidence from experimental research that finds that females tend to perform worse in more competitive contexts

pay and productivity differences between male and female veterinarians the author uses data from annual wage surveys conducted in 1994 and 1995 by medical economics research group to study differences in pay and productivity between male and female veterinarians in the wage salary sector the gender gap in average earnings was 15 when controls for various observable characteristics are added to the analysis the earnings gap narrows to 9 based on the most conservative estimates using unique revenue production measures in an analysis holding other factors constant the author finds that women s productivity was not statistically different from men s together the findings of gender differences in earnings but not in productivity are consistent with the presence of wage discrimination but the author explores other possible explanations as well

marriage and consumption insurance what s love got to do with it when markets are incomplete individuals may choose to marry to diversify their labor income risk love however can complicate the picture if love is fleeting or the resolution of agents income uncertainty occurs predominantly later in life then marriages with good economic matches last longer in contrast if love is persistent and the resolution of uncertainty to agents income occurs early then marriages with good economic matches are more likely to be caught short with too little love to save a marriage consequently once married the partners will be more likely to divorce evidence is provided to distinguish between these alternative scenarios

gender and culture this paper reviews the literature on gender and culture gender gaps in various outcomes competitiveness labor force participation and performance in mathematics amongst many others show remarkable differences across countries and tend to persist over time the economics literature initially explained these differences by looking at standard economic variables such as the level of development women s education the expansion of the service sector and discrimination more recent literature has argued that gender differences in a variety of outcomes could reflect underlying cultural values and beliefs this article reviews the literature on the relevance of culture in the determination of different forms of gender gap i examine how differences in historical situations could have been relevant in generating gender differences and the conditions under which gender norms tend to be stable or to change over time emphasizing the role of social learning finally i review the role of different forms of cultural transmission in shaping gender differences distinguishing between channels of vertical transmission the role of the family horizontal transmission the role of peers and oblique transmission the role of teachers or role models

heterogeneous human capital occupational choice and male female earnings differences human capital models have mainly focused on the rate of return to investment in a homogeneous stock of capital yet individuals have different initial attributes that determine comparative advantage in producing different types of human capital we find that mathematical ability is an important determinant of field choice for college students and that differences in earnings across fields are largely explained as a return to the use of scarce quantitative abilities in the production of each type of human capital the model successfully accounts for the observed male female differences in earnings and occupational choices of recent college graduates

existence and uniqueness of steady state equilibrium in a two sector overlapping generations model abstract in his seminal paper galor a two sector overlapping generations model a global characterization of the dynamical system econometrica 60 1992 1351 1386 establishes conditions for the existence of equilibrium in the two sector overlapping generations olg model although appealing theoretically these conditions are implicit and not easy to apply this paper develops new theorems on the existence and uniqueness of steady state equilibrium in the two sector olg model we provide explicit conditions on the utility and production functions for the existence and uniqueness of equilibrium with which one only needs to check the derivatives of the production and utility functions and their interactions without requiring solving for the savings function and its derivatives we present detailed steps to check the existence and uniqueness of equilibrium and provide illustrative examples

subject of degree and the gender wage differential evidence from the uk and germany abstract we show that controlling for subject of degree explains a significant part of the male female gender wage differential amongst graduates using data from the labour force surveys of the united kingdom and germany we find similar results in these two countries subject of degree explains about 2 4 higher wages of male over female graduates after controlling for age industry region part time and public sector employment this is a significant part between 8 and 20 of the overall male female gender wage gap and an even larger amount of the part explained by factors entered into wage equations at around 24 30 of the explained component

the gender gap in early career wage growth in the uk the gender pay gap on entry to the labour market is approximately zero but ten years after labour market entry there is a gender wage gap of almost 25 log points this article explores the reason for this gender gap in early career wage growth considering three main hypotheses human capital job shopping and psychological theories human capital factors can explain about 11 log points job shopping about 1 5 log points and the psychological theories up to 4 5 log points depending on the specification but a substantial unexplained gap remains women who have continuous full time employment have had no children and express no desire to have them earn about 8 log points less than equivalent men after 10 years in the labour market

the power of love abstract we show that the presence of at least one individual who loves its children whatever the intensity of this love allows to avoid a possible global contraction of the economy

the family as an incomplete annuities market families can self insure against uncertain dates of death through implicit or explicit agreements with respect to consumption and interfamily transfers interfamily transfers need have nothing to do with altruistic feelings they may simply reflect risk sharing behavior of completely selfish family members although family annuity markets are incomplete even small families can substitute by more than 70 percent for perfect market annuities given adverse selection and transaction costs family risk pooling may be preferred to public market annuities in the absence of public annuities these risk sharing arrangements provide powerful incentives for marriage and family formation

diagnosing discrimination stock returns and ceo gender a vast labor literature has found evidence of a glass ceiling whereby women are under represented among senior management a key question remains the extent to which this reflects unobserved differences in productivity preferences prejudice or systematically biased beliefs about the ability of female managers disentangling these theories would require data on productivity on the preferences of those who interact with managers and on perceptions of productivity financial markets provide continuous measures of the market s perception of the value of firms taking account of the beliefs of market participants about the ability of the men and women in senior management as such financial data hold the promise of potentially providing insight into the presence of mistake based discrimination specifically if female headed firms were systematically under estimated this would suggest that female headed firms would outperform expectations yielding excess returns examining data on s p 1500 firms over the period 1992 2004 i find no systematic differences in returns to holding stock in female headed firms although this result reflects the weak statistical power of our test rather than a strong inference that financial markets either do or do not under estimate female ceos jel j7 g14 j44

chaotic dynamics in an overlapping generations model with myopic and adaptive expectations in this paper we study dynamic behavior of an overlapping generations model under three different expectations perfect foresight myopic expectations and adaptive expectations we show that economic transition under myopic or adaptive expectations is very different from that under perfect foresight when agents are perfectly foresighted dynamics is simple with a unique steady state that is globally attracting however cycles and chaotic motion can appear under myopic and adaptive expectations we study the possibility of li yorke chaos under myopic expectations and entropic chaos under adaptive expectations

schooling search and spouse selection testing economic theories of marriage and household behavior the implications of the economic theories of marriage and of household fertility behavior are tested in a framework in which educational investment marital search and marital matches are responsive to marriage market conditions and the personal traits of individual agents some of which are unobserved by the econometrician implications are also derived and tested for the effects of longevity attractiveness preferences and labor and marriage market conditions on schooling marriage age and spouse choice the empirical results indicate that inattention to heterogeneity and martial selection leads to a false rejection of the economic theory of marriage but to a false acceptance of the value of time fertility hypothesis

cohabitation marriage and divorce in a model of match quality the objective of this research is to further our understanding of how and why individuals enter and leave coresidential relationships we develop and estimate an economic model of nonmarital cohabitation marriage and divorce that is consistent with current data on the formation and dissolution of relationships jovanovic s journal of political economy 87 1979 972 90 theoretical matching model is extended to help explain household formation and dissolution behavior implications of the model reveal what factors influence the decision to start a relationship what form this relationship will take and the relative stability of the various types of unions the structural parameters of the model are estimated using longitudinal data from a sample of female high school seniors from the united states new numerical methods are developed to reduce computational costs associated with estimation the empirical results have interesting interpretations given the structural model they show that a significant cause of cohabitation is the need to learn about potential partners and to hedge against future bad shocks the estimated parameters are used to conduct several comparative dynamic experiments for example we show that policy experiments changing the cost of divorce have little effect on relationship choices

the distribution of the male female earnings differential 1970 1990 the authors examine the male female earnings differential between 1970 and 1990 their objective is to provide consistent estimates that can be compared and interpreted over time and to assess the sensitivity of their results to alternative specifications the authors find that women made modest gains over the period standard decomposition techniques reveal that gender differences in observable characteristics do not explain much of the earnings differential most of the improvement in women s relative earnings has come by a decline in the unexplained component the authors also find that the differential varies systematically across age and education groups and across high and low income women coauthors are dwayne benjamin andree desaulniers and mary grant

heterogeneous preferences compensating wage differentials and comparable worth this paper sets up a general equilibrium model of a world of heterogeneous jobs and heterogeneous tastes and uses the model to i analyze the effects of employer discrimination and ii predict the likely consequences of requiring equal pay for jobs of comparable worth it shows that employment of both women and men is likely to fall as a result of comparable worth it also shows that when individuals tastes are heterogeneous neither comparable worth nor the simple model of compensating differentials on which it is based provides useful insights into wage determination in particular when tastes are heterogeneous there is no reason to expect equal pay for jobs of comparable worth even in the absence of employer discrimination

are there cultural effects on saving some cross sectional evidence why are there such large differences in saving rates across countries conventional economic analyses have not been successful in explaining international saving differences so economists have sometimes suggested that national saving differences may be explained by cultural differences this paper tests the hypothesis that cultural factors influence saving by comparing saving patterns of immigrants to canada from different cultures using data from the canadian survey of family expenditures we find no evidence of cultural effects on saving

do women shy away from competition do men compete too much we examine whether men and women of the same ability differ in their selection into a competitive environment participants in a laboratory experiment solve a real task first under a noncompetitive piece rate and then a competitive tournament incentive scheme although there are no gender differences in performance men select the tournament twice as much as women when choosing their compensation scheme for the next performance while 73 percent of the men select the tournament only 35 percent of the women make this choice this gender gap in tournament entry is not explained by performance and factors such as risk and feedback aversion only playa negligible role instead the tournament entry gap is driven by men being more overconfident and by gender differences in preferences for performing in a competition the result is that women shy away from competition and men embrace it

how uncertainty and ambiguity in tournaments affect gender differences in competitive behavior abstract tournament incentives prevail in labor markets yet the number of tournament winners is often unclear to competitors while it is hard to measure how this uncertainty affects work performance and willingness to compete in the field it can be studied in a controlled lab experiment we present a novel experiment where subjects can compete against each other but the number of winners is either uncertain but with known probabilities or ambiguous with unknown probabilities for different numbers of winners we compare these two conditions to a control treatment with a known number of winners we find that ambiguity induces a significant increase in the performance of men who choose to compete while we observe no change for women men also increase their willingness to enter competition in the presence of ambiguity overall both effects contribute to men winning the tournament significantly more often than women under uncertainty and ambiguity these findings suggest that management should make tournament conditions transparent and information available in order to prevent gender disparities from increasing under uncertainty and ambiguity

gender economics an assessment concerns about gender equality have jumped to the forefront of public debate in recent years and gender economics is slowly affirming its place as a major field of study this assessment examines where we are in terms of gender equality it reviews the theoretical foundations that can explain existing inequalities and documents the empirical findings supported by the theories identifying avenues for future research and providing a fruitful framework to think about the effectiveness of policies and interventions targeting gender inequality in doing so i provide the foundations against which the contributions in this issue can be placed

capital and labor saving technical change in an aging economy does population aging and the associated increase in the old age dependency ratio affect economic growth the answer is given in a novel analytical framework that allows for population aging to affect endogenous capital and labor saving technical change the short run analysis reveals that population aging induces more labor and less capital saving technical change as it increases the relative scarcity of labor with respect to capital due to external contemporaneous knowledge spill overs across innovating firms induced technical change has a first order effect on current aggregate income in the long run capitalsaving technical progress vanishes and the economy s growth rate reflects only labor saving technical change however the mere possibility of capital saving technical change is shown to imply that the economy s steady state growth rate becomes independent of its age structure neither a higher life expectancy nor a decline in fertility affects economic growth in the long run

gender differences in response to big stakes it is commonly perceived that increasing incentives improves performance however the reaction to increased incentives might differ between men and women leading to gender differences in performance in a natural experiment we study the gender difference in performance resulting from changes in stakes we use detailed information on the performance of high school students and exploit the variation in the stakes of tests which range from 5 to 27 of the final grade we find that female students outperform male students in all tests but to a relatively larger degree when the stakes are low the gender gap disappears in tests taken at the end of high school which count for 50 of the university entry grade jel d03 j16 i21 c30

do gender stereotypes reduce girls or boys human capital outcomes evidence from a natural experiment schools and teachers are often said to be a source of stereotypes that harm girls this paper tests for the existence of gender stereotyping and discrimination by public high school teachers in israel it uses a natural experiment based on blind and non blind scores that students receive on matriculation exams in their senior year using data on test results in several subjects in the humanities and sciences i found contrary to expectations that male students face discrimination in each subject these biases widen the female male achievement difference because girls outperform boys in all subjects except english and at all levels of the curriculum the bias is evident in all segments of the ability and performance distribution and is robust to various individual controls several explanations based on differential behavior between boys and girls are not supported empirically however the size of the difference is very sensitive to teachers characteristics suggesting that the bias against male students is the result of teachers and not students behavior

the career dynamics of high skilled women and men evidence from sweden in this paper we use matched worker firm register data from sweden to examine the career dynamics of high skill women and men specifically we track wages for up to 20 years among women and men b

existence uniqueness and stability of equilibrium in an overlapping generations model with productive capital abstract this paper analyzes the existence uniqueness and stability of a steady state equilibrium in an overlapping generations model with productive capital it is shown that for any feasible set of well behaved preferences there exists a production function that satisfies the inada conditions under which the economy experiences global contraction and the steady state equilibrium is characterized by the absence of production and consumption the study establishes a strengthened inada condition which is necessary to preclude global contraction and sufficient conditions for the existence of a unique and globally stable non trivial steady state equilibrium

gender differences in willingness to guess we present the results of an experiment that explores whether women are less willing than men to guess on multiple choice tests our test consists of practice questions from sat ii history tests we vary whether a penalty is imposed for a wrong answer and the salience of the evaluative nature of the task we find that when no penalty is assessed for a wrong answer all test takers answer every question but when there is a penalty for wrong answers women answer significantly fewer questions than men we see no differences in knowledge of the material or confidence in the test takers and differences in risk preferences explain less than half of the observed gap making the evaluative aspect of the test more salient does not impact the gender gap we show that conditional on their knowledge of the material test takers who skip questions do significantly worse on our test data as supplemental material are available at http dx doi org 10 1287 mnsc 2013 1776 this paper was accepted by uri gneezy behavioral economics

investment in schooling and the marriage market we present a model in which investment in schooling generates two kinds of returns the labor market return resulting from higher wages and a marriagemarket return defined as the impact of schooling on the marital surplus share one can extract men and women may have different incentives to invest in schooling because of different market wages or household roles this asymmetry can yield a mixed equilibrium with some educated individuals marrying uneducated spouses when the labor market returns to schooling rises home production demands less time and the traditional spousal labor division norms weaken more women may invest in schooling than men

wealth inequality educational environment and school enrolment evidence from mexico using data from the extended section of the 2010 mexican census 2 9 million households we study how school enrolment is associated with wealth inequality and with the educational environment the child is exposed to at the household and municipal levels we provide robust evidence of wealth inequality as a negative predictor of school enrolment for children in primary secondary and high school age ranges while a positive role is played by the educational environment through the introduction of interaction terms we account for how economic and educational variables are intertwined at both the household and the municipal level and we are able to illustrate the considerable heterogeneity in the role of adult education for households at different standards of living

early gender gaps among university graduates abstract we use data from six cohorts of university graduates in germany to assess the extent of gender gaps in college and labor market performance twelve to eighteen months after graduation men and women enter college in roughly equal numbers but more women than men complete their degrees women enter college with slightly better high school grades but women leave university with slightly lower marks immediately following university completion male and female full timers work a very similar number of hours per week but men earn more than women across the pay distribution with an unadjusted gender gap in full time monthly earnings of about 20 log points on average including a large set of controls reduces the gap to 5 10 log points the single most important proximate factor that explains the gap is field of study at university

gender gap in performance under competitive pressure admissions to czech universities uri gneezy muriel niederle and aldo rustichini 2003 presented experimental evi dence suggesting that women are less effective than men in competitive environments even if they perform similarly well in noncompeti tive settings such gender performance gaps under competition could help explain the near absence of women from top level manage rial positions which are awarded in repeated tournaments field data are now being used to test for the presence of such gaps in par ticular the competitive nature of the education process offers several testing opportunities as illustrated by e g joseph price 2008 in educational psychology studies women tend to report higher levels of exam anxiety see e g douglas a bors francois vigneau and antonia kronlund 2006 muriel niederle and lise vesterlund 2010 suggest that the large gender gap in mathematics performance may in part be explained by the differential manner in which men and women respond to competitive test taking environments evren ors frederic palomino and eloic peyrache 2008 study the performance of applicants to a top ranked french business school they show that within

pay differences among the highly paid the male female earnings gap in lawyers salaries this article uses very detailed information on graduates of the university of michigan law school to examine male female pay differences in that population men and women in this population have virtually identical human capital on graduation from law school allowing us to examine carefully the different impact of children and work history on men s and women s careers and earnings taking time from work in order to care for children reduces wages significantly but a rich set of controls including childcare work history school performance and job setting measures still leave one fourth to one third of the earnings gap unexplained

an investigation into sexual orientation discrimination as an explanation for wage differences this study explores the effects of sexual orientation on earnings it is found that ceteris paribus men living with male partners tend to earn less than other men and women living with female partners tend to earn more than other women these earnings differentials tend to vary by region they also vary by education and occupation for men and with the presence of minor children for women in addition the age earnings profiles of women living with female partners tend to be higher flatter and less concave than those of other women

economics and identity this paper considers how identity a person s sense of self affects economic outcomes we incorporate the psychology and sociology of identity into an economic model of behavior in the utility function we propose identity is associated with different social categories and how people in these categories should behave we then construct a simple game theoretic model showing how identity can affect individual interactions the paper adapts these models to gender discrimination in the workplace the economics of poverty and social exclusion and the household division of labor in each case the inclusion of identity substantively changes conclusions of previous economic analysis

in search of the glass ceiling gender and earnings growth among u s college graduates in the 1990s gender typical educational choices and the glass ceiling are widely believed to explain why older women earn far less than observably similar men using large panels drawn from the national science foundation s nsf national survey of college graduates and other data representative of u s college graduates from the 1990s the author documents the small role of personal choices and finds evidence contrary to the predictions of both human capital and discrimination models rather than the differential wage growth rates predicted by these models she finds similar average rates of earnings growth for women and men across numerous specifications which suggests that the gender gap in earnings is determined by factors already present early in the career her findings reveal slower earnings growth in only two subsets of women young mothers who experience slower earnings growth during the early career relative to men the same age but then compensate with faster growth later in their careers and women wit

migration family and risk diversification this article proposes a formal model of migration in which workers are heterogeneous and markets are stochastically correlated we derive and characterize the optimal migration pattern of a family we show that migration can take place even when migrants earn less abroad and surprisingly when earnings in the foreign country are riskier for every member of the family moreover it may well be an optimal arrangement to have only dependents migrate thus rationalizing the recent dependent oriented migration flows from places like hong kong and taiwan we provide some evidence in support of our theory

male female wage differentials and policy responses without implicating them for any of the contents of the paper i am grateful to the following for helpful discussions or comments andrea beller university of illinois david bloom harvard and columnbia glen cain university of wisconsin ron ehrenberg cornell victor fuchs stanford bob gregory australian national university jonathan leonard university of california berkeley roberta robb brock university and paul weiler harvard financial support of the humanities and social sciences committee of the research board of the universitu of toronto is eratefullu acknowlede ed

mothers and sons preference formation and female labor force dynamics this paper argues that the growing presence of a new type of man one brought up in a family in which the mother worked has been a significant factor in the increase in female labor force participation over time we present cross sectional evidence showing that the wives of men whose mothers worked are themselves significantly more likely to work we use variation in the importance of world war ii as a shock to women s labor force participation as proxied by variation in the male draft rate across u s states to provide evidence in support of the intergenerational consequences of our propagation mechanism

do schools matter for high math achievement evidence from the american mathematics competitions this paper uses data from the american mathematics competitions to examine the rates at which different high schools produce high achieving math students there are large differences in the frequency with which students from seemingly similar schools reach high achievement levels the distribution of unexplained school effects includes a thick tail of schools that produce many more high achieving students than is typical several additional analyses suggest that the differences are not primarily due to unobserved differences in student characteristics the differences are persistent across time suggesting that differences in the effectiveness of educational programs are not primarily due to direct peer effects

marriage and the city search frictions and sorting of singles this paper develops and tests a model where cities play an important role as marriage markets the idea is simple cities are dense areas where singles can meet more potential partners than in rural areas to enjoy those benefits they are willing to pay a premium in terms of higher housing prices once married the benefits from meeting more potential partners vanish and married couples move out of the city attractive singles benefit most from a dense market and are therefore more likely to move to the city those predictions are tested and confirmed with a unique danish data set

understanding the effects of marriage and divorce on financial investments the role of background risk sharing we investigate how changes in marital status affect financial investments and how these effects vary with background risk we use detailed register based panel data and difference in differences estimators to benchmark common unobserved influences on financial investments women increase the fraction of wealth invested in stocks after marriage and decrease it after divorce whereas men show the opposite behavior households whose joint labor income risk is reduced more by marriage have a higher increase in their exposure to risky assets in marriage thus income risk sharing in the household is important for financial risk taking and investment responses to marital transitions jel g11 j12 j16 d14

gender competitiveness and career choices gender differences in competitiveness have been hypothesized as a potential explanation for gender differences in education and labor market outcomes we examine the predictive power of a standard laboratory experimental measure of competitiveness for the later important choice of academic track of secondary school students in the netherlands although boys and girls display similar levels of academic ability boys choose substantially more prestigious academic tracks where more prestigious tracks are more math and science intensive our experimental measure shows that boys are also substantially more competitive than girls we find that competitiveness is strongly positively correlated with choosing more prestigious academic tracks even conditional on academic ability most important we find that the gender difference in competitiveness accounts for a substantial portion about 20 of the gender difference in track choice

male female wage differentials in job ladders much of the male female wage differential exists because men and women are assigned to different jobs within narrow job categories there is no male female differential only a tortured taste theory of discrimination can reconcile these facts we argue that differential movement along job ladders entails comparative advantage so the ability standard for promotion is higher for women this implies that more able women will be passed over in favor of less able men women assumed to have the same ability distribution as men earn less the differential reflects females lower promotion probability not within job discrimination

the changing of the boards the impact on firm valuation of mandated female board representation in 2003 a new law required that 40 of norwegian firms directors be women at the time only 9 of directors were women we use the prequota cross sectional variation in female board representation to instrument for exogenous changes to corporate boards following the quota we find that the constraint imposed by the quota caused a significant drop in the stock price at the announcement of the law and a large decline in tobin s q over the following years consistent with the idea that firms choose boards to maximize value the quota led to younger and less experienced boards increases in leverage and acquisitions and deterioration in operating performance copyright 2012 oxford university press

human capital vs signalling explanations of wages increases wages by directly increasing the worker s productivity this learning explanation is usually associated with human capital theory however it seems unlikely that learning explains all the wage differences associated with schooling and work history better educated workers are not a random sample of workers they have lower propensities to quit or to be absent are less likely to smoke drink or use illicit drugs and are generally healthier it is unlikely that employers make full use of differences in propensities to quit or to be absent or sick when hiring workers these characteristics are often not directly observed and the americans with disabilities act precludes firms from using either poor health or the likelihood of future sickness as a hiring criterion unless it is directly related to job performance however if low levels of education are associated with these unfavorable employee characteristics and employers are allowed to take education into account when hiring workers we would expect employers to favor better educated workers as a means of reducing their costs of sickness and job turnover in turn students will take these hiring criteria into account when deciding how long to stay in school students will choose a length of schooling to signal their ability to employers and employers will demand a minimum level of schooling

on the state of the union an overlapping generations model of marriage and divorce is constructed to analyze family structure and intergenerational mobility agents differ by sex marital status and human capital single agents meet in a marriage market and decide whether to accept or reject proposals to wed married couples must decide whether to separate or not parents invest in their children depending on their wherewithal a simulated version of the theoretical prototype can generate an equilibrium with a significant number of female headed families and a high degree of persistence in income across generations to illustrate the model s mechanics the effects of two antipoverty policies namely child support and welfare are investigated

myopic and perfect foresight in the olg model we compare the dynamics under myopic foresight and under perfect foresight in an overlapping generations model with capital accumulation and two period lived individuals when the rational dynamics are defined and the myopic dynamics are monotonic the study of myopic foresight allows to characterize the dynamics under perfect foresight the study of myopic dynamics also allows to obtain a condition of uniqueness of the steady state that bears only on the second order derivatives of the utility and production functions

sorting and long run inequality many social commentators have raised concerns over the possibility that increased sorting in society may lead to greater inequality to investigate this we construct a dynamic model of intergenerational education acquisition fertility and marital sorting and parameterize the steady state to match several basic empirical endings we end that increased sorting will signiecantly increase income inequality four factors are important to our endings a negative correlation between fertility and education a decreasing marginal effect of parental education on children s years of education wages that are sensitive to the relative supply of skilled workers and borrowing constraints that affect educational attainment for some low income households

bargaining sorting and the gender wage gap quantifying the impact of firms on the relative pay of women there is growing evidence that rm specic pay premiums are an important source of wage inequality these premiums will contribute to the gender wage gap if women are less likely to work at high paying rms or if women negotiate worse wage bargains with their employers than men using longitudinal data on the hourly wages of portuguese workers matched with balance sheet information for rms we show that the wages of both men and women contain rm specic premiums that are strongly correlated with employer productivity we then show how the impact of these rm specic pay dierentials on the gender wage gap can be decomposed into a combination of bargaining and sorting eects consistent with the bargaining literature we nd that women receive only 90 of the rm specic pay premiums earned by men notably we obtain very similar estimates of the relative bargaining power ratio from our analysis of between rm wage premiums and from analyzing changes in

performance in competitive environments gender differences even though the provision of equal opportunities for men and women has been a priority in many countries large gender differences prevail in competitive high ranking positions suggested explanations include discrimination and differences in preferences and human capital in this paper we present experimental evidence in support of an additional factor women may be less effective than men in competitive environments even if they are able to perform similarly in non competitive environments in a laboratory experiment we observe as we increase the competitiveness of the environment a significant increase in performance for men but not for women this results in a significant gender gap in performance in tournaments while there is no gap when participants are paid according to piece rate this effect is stronger when women have to compete against men than in single sex competitive environments this suggests that women may be able to perform in competitive environments per se

competitive pressure widens the gender gap in performance evidence from a two stage competition in mathematics in two stage elimination math contests participants from four different age groups compete to pass from stage 1 to stage 2 and later to be among the winners although female participants have higher maths grades at school the gender gap reverses in the two stages of the contests more importantly following the same individual participant across different stages we find that the gender gap in performance increases from stage 1 to stage 2 the increase in female underperformance is attributed to higher competitive pressure and alternative explanations based on selection discrimination and differences in reaction to increasing difficulty are ruled out

consumption smoothing migration and marriage evidence from rural india a significant proportion of migration in low income countries particularly in rural areas is composed of moves by women for the purpose of marriage we seek to explain these mobility patterns by examining marital arrangements among indian households in particular we hypothesize that the marriage of daughters to locationally distant dispersed yet kinship related households is a manifestation of implicit interhousehold contractual arrangements aimed at mitigating income risks and facilitating consumption smoothing in an environment characterized by information costs and spatially covariant risks analysis of longitudinal south indian village data lends support to the hypothesis marriage cum migration contributes significantly to a reduction in the variability of household food consumption farm households afflicted with more variable profits tend to engage in longer distance marriage cum migration the hypothesized and observed marriage cum migration patterns are in dissonance with standard models of marriage or migration that are concerned primarily with search costs and static income gains

educational homogamy how much is opportunities individuals match on length and type of education we find that around half of the systematic sorting on education is explained by the tendency of individuals to marry someone who went to the same educational institution or to an institution near them this may be due to low search frictions or selection of people with the same preferences into the same institutions the residual half of the systematic sorting on education is a direct effect of partners education which is potentially explained by complementarities in household production in couples with same education