selection investment and women s relative wages over time in theory growing wage inequality within gender should cause women to invest more in their market productivity and should differentially pull able women into the workforce our paper uses heckman s two step estimator and identification at infinity on repeated current population survey cross sections to calculate relative wage series for women since 1970 that hold constant the composition of skills we find that selection into the female full time full year workforce shifted from negative in the 1970s to positive in the 1990s and that the majority of the apparent narrowing of the gender wage gap reflects changes in female workforce composition we find the same types of composition changes by measuring husbands wages and national longitudinal survey iq data as proxies for unobserved skills our findings help to explain why growing wage equality between genders coincided with growing inequality within gender

sources of intra industry wage dispersion how much do employers matter observed human capital explains less than half of wage variation in bls industry wage surveys establishment based wage differentials controlling for occupation account for 20 70 percent of intra industry wage variation this corresponds to a standard deviation in wages of 14 percent of the mean almost as large as interindustry wage variation investigation suggests that establishment wage differentials are not random variations or returns to usual measures of human capital

does family income matter for schooling outcomes using adoptees as a natural experiment one would expect that family income is an important positive factor in children s school attainment however evidence is often tainted by the lack of control for parental ability since at least a portion of ability is transferred genetically to children this paper uses a sample of adopted children and offers genetically unbiased estimates we further correct for biases arising from unobserved parenting qualities and from parents differentiation between their own birth and adopted children family income still has a significant effect it implies that high ability children in low income families face binding credit constraints that society may wish to relieve

the gender gap fertility and growth changes in fertility have long been recognized as important correlates of economic growth with the relationship between the level of fertility and the level of income per capita being one of the strongest observable correlations in cross country data this paper examines the linkages between fertility and growth theory the structure of the model is presented in sections on production couples decision making system dynamics and steady state equilibria the first component of the model is that increases in capital per worker raise womens relative wages since capital is more complementary to womens labor input than to mens the second component is that increasing womens relative wages reduces fertility by raising the cost of children more than household income finally lower fertility raises the level of capital per worker a positive feedback loop generates demographic transition a rapid decline in fertility accompanied by accelerated output growth

skill biased technological change and rising wage inequality some problems and puzzles the recent rise in wage inequality is usually attributed to skill biased technical change sbtc associated with new computer technologies we review the evidence for this hypothesis focusing on the implications of sbtc for overall wage inequality and for changes in wage differentials between groups a key problem for the sbtc hypothesis is that wage inequality stabilized in the 1990s despite continuing advances in computer technology sbtc also fails to explain the evolution of other dimensions of wage inequality including the gender and racial wage gaps and the age gradient in the return to education

does increasing women s schooling raise the schooling of the next generation the positive cross sectional relationship between the schooling of mothers and their children is substantially biased upward due to correlations between schooling and heritable ability as well as assortative mating an increase in the schooling of women would not have beneficial effects in terms of the schooling of children increased maternal schooling leads to reduced home time for mothers anticipating the consequences of investing in women s schooling requires attention to the role that schooling plays in the marriage market as well as to opportunities in the labor market for women

export led growth and import dependence the case of taiwan 1969 1981 abstract taiwan provides a notable example of successful export led growth in recent years this paper explores the prospects for her continued growth by examining past changes on the supply side the leontief input output framework is employed it is found that the level of import content in exports increased during the course of taiwan s export led growth on a sectoral level the level of import dependence also increased for all but some leading export sectors linkage effects of exports are not large enough to offset the price effect and the effect of the spreading of import dependent technology to other sectors the decline in export s domestic content has been more than offset by the increase in quantity of exports so that taiwan s income has been growing this decline in the domestic content slowed from 1976 to 1981 but so did the growth in export volume which reflects the effects of protectionism and the difficulty of finding enough new exportables

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

a meta analysis of the international gender wage gap abstract since the early 1970s a number of authors have calculated gender wage differentials between women and men of equal productivity this meta study provides a new quantitative review of this vast amount of empirical literature on gender wage differentials as it concerns not only differences in methodology data and time periods but also different countries we place particular emphasis on a proper consideration of the quality of the underlying study which is done by a weighting with quality indicators the results show that data restrictions i e the limitation of the analysis to new entrants never marrieds or one narrow occupation only have the biggest impact on the resulting gender wage gap moreover we are able to show what effect a misspecification of the underlying wage equation like the frequent use of potential experience has on the calculated gender wage gap over time raw wage differentials worldwide have fallen substantially however most of this decrease is due to better labor market endowments of females

job polarization in europe the structure of employment is always changing and economists are always trying to understand those changes in the 1990s the idea of skill biased technological change sbtc was used to understand the shift in employment toward more educated workers see david h autor and lawrence f katz 1999 for a survey however in recent years it has become appar ent that a more nuanced approach is needed the idea of sbtc might lead one to predict a uni form shift in employment away from low skilled and toward high skilled occupations but studies for the united states autor katz and melissa s kearney 2006 and the united kingdom goos and manning 2007 have shown that there is growth in employment in both the high est skilled professional and managerial and lowest skilled personal services occupations with declining employment in the middle of the distribution manufacturing and routine office jobs this is what goos and manning 2007 term job polarization although see the introduc tion to goos and manning 2007 for antecedents of these ideas there are several hypotheses about the rea sons for job polarization first the routiniza tion hypothesis first put forward by autor frank levy and richard murnane 2003 sug gests that the effect of technological progress is to replace routine labor which tends to be clerical and craft jobs in the middle of the wage distribution second there is the view that globalization in general and offshoring in par ticular is an important source of change in the job structure in the richest countries see for example alan s blinder 2007 third there may be a link between job polarization and

estimating returns to education using twins in urban china abstract this paper empirically estimates the return to education using twins data that the authors collected from urban china our ordinary least squares estimate shows that one year of schooling increases an individual s earnings by 8 4 if we use a within twin fixed effects model the return is reduced to 2 7 but rises to 3 8 after the correction of measurement error these results suggest that a large portion of the estimated returns to education is due to omitted ability or the family effect we further investigate why the true return is low and the omitted ability bias high and find evidence showing that it may be a consequence of china s education system which is highly selective and exam oriented more specifically we find that high school education may mainly serve as a mechanism to select college students but as a human capital investment per se it has low returns in terms of earnings in contrast both vocational school education and college education have a large return that is comparable to that found in the united states

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

estimating the economic return to educational levels using data on twins this paper relaxes some restrictions of previous twin based estimates of the effects of education on earnings first it estimates the earnings premiums associated with different educational levels second it estimates a piecewise linear relationship between the natural logarithm of annual earnings and years of schooling third the measurement error corrections are based on a less restrictive non classical measurement error model the estimation strategy implies that ability bias can be investigated separately in different parts of the educational distribution the linear relationship between the logarithm of annual earnings and years of schooling is rejected furthermore the results in the sample of identical mz twins indicated both that the ability bias could be of different signs and of different magnitudes in different parts of the educational distribution the twin based estimates in the sample of fraternal dz twins did not display any marked differences as compared to the cross sectional estimates finally the results indicated that the error corrected twin based estimates of the average return to years of schooling that rely on a classical measurement error model are upwards biased by approximately 30 copyright 2004 john wiley sons ltd

the cultural revolution and returns to schooling in china estimates based on twins abstract this paper investigates the returns to schooling in china for the cultural revolution cr cohort and the non cr cohort using a new set of chinese twins data applying the fixed effects model on twins data which helps to control for the genetic and family background effects this paper examines whether the cr cohort has smaller economic returns to schooling than the non cr cohort the empirical results in this paper indicate that the cultural revolution has not played a significantly adverse role in the returns to schooling

astronomics in action the graduate earnings premium and the dragon effect in singapore white u s and latin american currencies portray images of national independence heroes singapore s 2 dollar bill the most widely circulated since there is no smaller denomination shows students in a classroom listening to a professor with a university in the background underneath there is just one word education singapore s obsession with education miami herald 8 september 2009 i introduction since the groundbreaking work of mincer 1974 many academics have looked closely at the question of what the return to education might be 1 however because of the lack of data the literature does not have much to say about singapore even though a lot of research has been done for advanced countries throughout the world 2 3 in this paper we employ a recent survey from the singapore national youth council to study one aspect of this topic the return to university education in singapore having a university education is usually perceived to be good for one s career although the extent to which this is true has been a constant point of contention 4 this debate had relied largely on anecdotes instead of econometric research understandably so because data is not easily available therefore this paper hopes to offer some evidence on the causal link between university education and earnings outcome in singapore however identification is a formidable challenge as in any research that aims to estimate the return to education although the positive association between education and earnings is a virtually ubiquitous fact prima facie evidence of income gaps may misrepresent what the true return to education is because individuals tend to make educational choices according to their abilities such income gaps would contain not only the return that is due to education the quantity of interest but also the return on unobserved abilities which is the confounding effect over the years economists have sought to disentangle the causal effect of education from the confounding effect of unobserved abilities in the data but the existing estimation approaches are not easily adaptable here for example methods that employ within twin comparisons or changes in compulsory schooling laws cannot be implemented owing to data limitations and the lack of important schooling reforms in singapore 5 in fact the dataset used here was compiled for a different purpose than economics which is to provide a better understanding of singapore s youths from a sociological perspective given these issues a new estimation approach has to be considered in this paper we propose to exploit a consequence li liu and zhang 2012 of chinese traditions generating the so called dragon effect to study the causal link between university education and income in singapore chinese is the largest ethnic group and malays indians and eurasians are the main ethnic minorities according to chinese traditions there are 12 creatures in the chinese zodiac where each represents a lunar year in a 12 year cycle among them the dragon is the most auspicious creature and babies born in a dragon year are believed to be superior 6 because of this conviction the dragon year has seen upswings in the rate of birth not just in singapore but also in places where chinese culture is prevalent 7 for example figure 1 plots the birth rate from 1970 in singapore based on resident women aged between 15 and 49 8 while the fertility rate was plunging early on it did increase momentarily during the dragon year of 1976 there was another sharp increase in 1988 9 and then in 2000 which marks the highly auspicious year of the golden dragon figure 1 omitted the positive relationship between the birth rate and the dragon year provides the rationale behind the identification strategy used here as the dragon cohort is larger than usual competition for entry into university would be more intense leading to what is known as the dragon effect

estimates of the economic returns to schooling from a new sample of twins this paper uses a new survey to contrast the wages of genetically identical twins with different schooling levels multiple measurements of schooling levels were also collected to assess the effect of reporting error on the estimated economic returns to schooling the data indicate that omitted ability variables do not bias the estimated return to schooling upward but that measurement error does bias it downward adjustment for measurement error indicates that an additional year of schooling increases wages by 12 to 16 percent a higher estimate of the economic returns to schooling than has been previously found copyright 1994 by american economic association

rates of return to four year university education an application of regression discontinuity design estimating the rate of return to university education is invariably difficult due to the problem of omitted variable bias using a regression discontinuity design we estimate the effect of four year university education on earnings and explore the pathways through which the effect operates our estimation exploits the centralized score based college university admission system in china where the minimum scores required for university admission are externally determined by the provincial governments our findings suggest that being eligible for four year university admission implies a sizable increase in earnings with the payoff being attributable to prolonged length of education and improvements in education quality although the quality effects may not be precisely estimated this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

robots and jobs evidence from us labor markets we study the effects of industrial robots on us labor markets we show theoretically that robots may reduce employment and wages and that their local impacts can be estimated using variation in exp

the growth effects of education in australia in this article we estimate the growth effect of human capital with country specific time series data for australia in doing so we extended the solow 1956 growth model by using educational attainment as a measure of human capital developed by barro and lee 2010 the extended solow 1956 model performs well after allowing for the presence of structural changes our results based on alternative time series methods show that educational attainment has a small and significant permanent effect on the growth rate of per worker output in australia

the taste for leisure career choice and the returns to education abstract we develop a simple methodology to estimate the returns to education despite heterogeneous labor leisure preferences the labor supply behavior of doctors and physician assistants is consistent with people choosing between the two careers based on differing tastes for leisure

exports growth and causality in developing countries abstract previous empirical studies have interpreted results in regressions of output variables on export variables as providing support for an export promotion development strategy such an interpretation is questionable since these regressions provide no means of determining the direction of causality this paper performs causality tests between exports and growth for 37 developing countries the results cast considerable doubt on the validity of the export promotion hypothesis

beyond export led growth abstract in light of the adverse conditions in the current international economic environment this paper reassesses the feasibility of continuing to rely on manufacturing export led growth as the major development dynamic for most ldcs during the next decade this paper argues that after the initial stages of industrial development the emphasis in policy toward agriculture should shift from surplus extraction to surplus creation and to the generation of demand linkages with the rest of the economy the author compares the relative merits of two alternative open development strategies export led industrialization and agricultural demand led industrialization adli by means of several simulation experiments the experiments are performed with a computable general equilibrium model of a small low income semi industrial open economy which is a stylization of south korea of 1963 they are carried out in an international environment assumed to represent the next decade based on a rate of growth of international demand for imports of about half the 1960 1973 rate the results support the adli approach on all counts

human capital investment and the gender division of labor in a brawn based economy we use a model of human capital investment and activity choice to explain facts describing gender differentials in the levels and returns to human capital investments these include the higher return to and level of schooling the small effect of healthiness on wages and the large effect of healthiness on schooling for females relative to males the model incorporates gender differences in the level and responsiveness of brawn to nutrition in a roy economy setting in which activities reward skill and brawn differentially empirical evidence from rural bangladesh provides support for the model and the importance of the distribution of brawn

returns to education evidence from u k twins we use a new sample of uk female identical twins to estimate private economic returns to education we report findings in three areas first we use identical twins to control for family effects and genetic ability bias and the education reported by the other twin to control for schooling measurement error our estimates suggest a return to schooling for uk females of about 7 7 second we investigate within twin pair ability differences by examining within twin pair and between family correlations of education with observable correlates of ability including birthweight ability tests and reading scores our findings suggest lower ability bias in within twin pair regressions than pooled regressions third using data on twins smoking we show smoking reflects family background and using it as an instrument exacerbates ability bias this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

using unemployment rates as instruments to estimate returns to schooling i use state unemployment rates during a person s teenage years to estimate the returns to schooling a higher unemployment rate reduces the opportunity costs of attending school using the same 1980 census data set that angrist and krueger 1991 use i also estimate returns to schooling with a modified version of their quarter of birth instrument the estimates from the two stage least squares 2sls model using the unemployment rate and the model using the quarter of birth instruments are almost identical in addition these 2sls estimates are larger than the ordinary least squares ols estimates supporting this counterintuitive yet prevalent result in the literature

africa s education enigma the nigerian story abstract in the last two decades the social and economic benefits of formal education in sub saharan africa have been debated anecdotal evidence points to low returns to education in africa unfortunately there is limited econometric evidence to support these claims at the micro level in this study i focus on nigeria a country that holds 1 5 of africa s population i use instruments based on the exogenous timing of the implementation and withdrawal of free primary education across regions in this country to consistently estimate the returns to education in the late 1990s the results show the average returns to education are particularly low in the 90s in contrast to conventional wisdom for developing countries 2 8 for every extra year of schooling between 1997 and 1999 surprisingly i find no significant differences between ols and iv estimates of returns to education when necessary controls are included in the wage equation the low returns to education results shed new light on both the changes in demand for education in nigeria and the increased emigration rates from african countries that characterized the 90s

two sides of the same coin u s residual inequality and the gender gap abstract we show that the narrowing gender gap and the growth in earnings inequality are consistent with a simple model in which skills are heterogeneous and the growth in skill prices has been particularly strong for skills with which women are well endowed empirical analysis of dot cps and nlsy79 data finds evidence to support this model a large increase in the prices of cognitive and people skills skills with which women are well endowed and a decline in the price of motor skills account for up to 40 percent of the rising inequality and 20 percent of the narrowing gender gap

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

robots computers and the gender wage gap abstract we analyze the effects of two automation technologies industrial robots and computing equipment on the gender wage gap in us local labor markets between 1990 and 2015 we find distinct impact of robot and computer capital an increase in robots decreases male wage more than female wage whereas an increase in computers reduces female wage more than male wage according to our estimates one additional unit of robot per thousand workers reduces gender wage gap by 0 3 log points and by contrast an increase in computer capital by one million dollars per thousand workers increases gender wage gap by 4 1 log points

what do twins studies reveal about the economic returns to education a comparison of australian and us findings conventional estimates of rates of return to education are constrained because they are unable to isolate the returns to schooling from the contribution of individual ability and the influence of family background potentially studies using a sample of twins may overcome these problems monozygotic twins are genetically identical and if they have been reared together share the same family background differences in income between identical twins can therefore be associated with differences in the amount of education they have undertaken in order to estimate the independent influence of education comparisons of such estimates with estimates made from a sample of dizygotic twins who are genetically similar but not identical and who are also reared together may permit evaluation of the biases associated with ability and family background in conventional estimates of the return to education in an important paper jere behrman et al 1977 analyzed data from a sample of male world war ii veteran twins and found that of the overall rate of return to schooling of 8 percent 2 7 percentage points could be attributed to schooling per se 3 2 percentage points could be attributed to genetic factors and 2 1 percentage points could be attributed to shared family environment in a recent paper however orley ashenfelter and alan krueger 1994 have estimated the economic returns to education using data on a new sample of twins which permitted them to adjust their estimate for omitted ability variables and measurement error on this basis they find that family and genetic effects make virtually no contribution to the returns to schooling measurement error however biases the estimated return to schooling downward the findings of ashenfelter and krueger 1994 are very different from previous work in this field and there is now some confusion as to what analysis of twins data really reveals about the economic returns to schooling ashenfelter and krueger s results are based on analysis of data for a sample of 298 individuals 149 pairs of identical twins who attended a twins festival in 1991 they remark at the end of their paper only additional data collection is likely to lead to better estimates of the returns to schooling p 1171

endowments and the allocation of schooling in the family and in the marriage market the twins experiment 03 we show how comparisons between the within twin correlations of human capital outcomes across identical and nonidentical twins can be used to identify the variability in the individual specific component of endowments and the responsiveness of schooling to individual specific endowments in the family and in the marriage market even when schooling is measured with error estimates from two twins samples indicate that 27 42 percent of the variance in log earnings obesity is due to variability in individual specific endowments allocations of schooling reinforce specific endowments and individual specific earnings endowments of men and their wives schooling are negatively associated

explaining women s success technological change and the skill content of women s work the closing of the gender wage gap is an ongoing phenomenon in industrialized countries however research has been limited in its ability to understand the causes of these changes due in part to an inability to directly compare the work of women to that of men in this study we use a new approach for analyzing changes in the gender pay gap that uses direct measures of job tasks and gives a comprehensive characterization of how work for men and women has changed in recent decades using data from west germany we find that women have witnessed relative increases in non routine analytic tasks and non routine interactive tasks which are associated with higher skill levels the most notable difference between the genders is however the pronounced relative decline in routine task inputs among women with little change for men these relative task changes explain a substantial fraction of the closing of the gender wage gap our evidence suggests that these task changes are driven at least in part by technological change we also show that these task changes are related to the recent polarization of employment between low and high skilled occupations that we observed in the 1990s

the returns to computer use revisited have pencils changed the wage structure too are the large measured wage differentials for on the job computer use a true return to computer skills or do they just reflect that higher wage workers use computers on their jobs we examine this issue with three large cross sectional surveys from germany first we confirm that the estimated wage differential associated with computer use in germany is very similar to the u s differential second we also measure large differentials for on the job use of calculators telephones pens or pencils or for those who work while sitting down we argue that these findings cast some doubt on the literal interpretation of the computer use wage differential as reflecting true returns to computer use or skill

birth weight and schooling and earnings estimates from a sample of twins based on analysis of a sample of twins this study suggests that birth weight is not related to levels of schooling that it plays only a minor role in the determination of earnings and that ability differences that are not removed in the within twins model of earnings are not biasing the results in twins studies such as ashenfelter and krueger ashenfelter o krueger a 1994 estimates of the economic return to schooling from a new sample of twins american economic review 84 5 pp 1157 1173 d 2004 elsevier b v all rights reserved

estimating the return to endogenous schooling decisions via conditional second moments this paper employs conditional second moments to identify the impact of education in wage regressions where education is treated as endogenous this approach avoids the use of instrumental variables in a setting where instruments are frequently not available we employ this methodology to estimate the returns to schooling for a sample of australian workers we find that accounting for the endogeneity of education in this manner increases the estimated return to education from 6 percent to 10 percent