domestic violence a nonrandom affair in this paper we develop and estimate a model of domestic violence we extend a noncooperative model of the family to include violence as a source of gratification and an instrument for controlling behavior we estimate the model by robust methods since the violence process appears to have a heavy tailed nonnormal error distribution we find that the properties of the equilibria depend on family income for low middle income families our results indicate an equilibrium in which one person s reservation utility constraint is binding whereas for higher income families both individuals may gain from the relationship

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

terror as a bargaining instrument a case study of dowry violence in rural india this ethnographic study examined the sociocultural context of domestic violence and dowry in india and describes a theoretical model and econometric methodology the model was tested with survey data collected from a sub caste of 149 potter families from 3 villages in karnataka state in south india interviews were conducted among 139 adult married women and 130 married men the case studies demonstrate that violence can be used as a way to redistribute resources bargaining over dowry amounts occurs twice once before the marriage and renegotiations after the wife had moved to the husbands family domestic violence may be a weapon in order to obtain higher transfers at the renegotiation stage the model assumes that the level of dowry and the occurrence of violence are determined simultaneously hypotheses tested whether increases in husbands family wealth in the dowry paid and husbands cost of violent behavior reduces the incidence of violence tests determined whether increases in wifes familys wealth and increases in wifes human capital husbands human capital or wifes cost of violence increase violence 23 reported wife beating at some time a 10000 rupee increase in the wifes parents income increased the risk of violence by 4 a 10000 rupee increase in the husbands parents income reduced the risk of violence by 10 a 10000 rupee increase in dowry reduced the risk by 5 an additional male child reduced the risk by 11 female sterilization increased the risk by 16 findings suggest that husbands beat wives when the wifes family is rich and when dowries are small

unemployment and domestic violence theory and evidence is unemployment the overwhelming determinant of domestic violence that many commentators expect it to be the contribution of this paper is to examine theoretically and empirically how changes in unemployment affect the incidence of domestic abuse the key theoretical prediction is that male and female unemployment have opposite signed effects on domestic abuse an increase in male unemployment decreases the incidence of intimate partner violence while an increase in female unemployment increases domestic abuse combining data on intimate partner violence from the british crime survey with locally disaggregated labor market data from the uk s annual population survey we find strong evidence in support of the theoretical prediction

until death do you part the effects of unilateral divorce on spousal homicides this study examines how the widespread adoption of unilateral divorce influenced the prevalence of lethal spousal violence in the united states these evaluations are based on fixed effects specifications for spousal homicide counts from an annual panel of u s states from 1968 to 1978 the results indicate that unrestricted unilateral divorce laws had small and statistically insignificant effects on the amount of lethal spousal violence directed against wives however the easy access to divorce created by such laws increased spousal homicides of husbands by approximately 21 these increases were concentrated in states where the division of marital property favored husbands

how costly is affirmative action government contracting and california s proposition 209 abstract this paper investigates the effect of disadvantaged business enterprise subcontractor goals on the winning bids for highway construction contracts using california s proposition 209 which prohibited the consideration of race or gender in awarding state funded contracts after proposition 209 prices on state funded contracts fell by 5 6 relative to federally funded projects for which preferences still applied most of the price decline after proposition 209 resulted from the mix of subcontractors employed which seems to arise from the higher costs of firms located in high minority areas finally short run barriers to entry and expansion may increase the cost of affirmative action

subjective performance measures in optimal incentive contracts objective measures of performance are seldom perfect in response incentive contracts often include important subjective components that mitigate incentive distortions caused by imperfect objective measures this paper explores the combined use of subjective and objective performance measures in respectively implicit and explicit incentive contracts naturally objective and subjective measures often are substitutes sometimes strikingly so we show that if objective measures are sufficiently close to perfect then no implicit contracts are feasible because the firm s fallback position after reneging on an implicit contract is too attractive we also show however that objective and subjective measures can reinforce each other if objective measures become more accurate then in some circumstances the optimal contract puts more weight on subjective measures because the improved objective measures increase the value of the ongoing relationship and so reduce the firm s incentive to renege we also analyze the use of subjective weights on objective performance measures and provide case study evidence consistent with our analyses

anti discrimination or reverse discrimination the impact of changing demographics title vii and affirmative action on productivity this study estimates the changes over time in the relative productivities of minorities and females i find no significant evidence that the productivity of minorities or females decreased relative to that of white males as relative minority and female employment increased during the 1960s and 1970s this study also compares the impact of title vii and affirmative action and presents evidence that title vii litigation has played a significant role in increasing black employment this suggests that the employment of minorities and females has not entailed large efficiency costs and that title vii litigation has had some success in fighting racial discrimination the eeoc has sometimes been credited with opening up new pools of labor that corporations somehow contrived to ignore and occasionally with hastening the breakdown of traditional barriers to labor mobility but in the context of the market s endless search for efficiency these anomalies would have been eliminated anyway leaving only the question of whether they were worth the expenditures compelled by law affirmative action is a net cost to the economy and the true dynamic effects the opportunity cost of all this expense and effort the diminution of competition inefficiencies due to the employment and promotion of marginal labor and the consequent demoralization of good workers can only be a matter of conjecture although they are clearly the most important of all senator orrin hatch 1980

love hate and murder commitment devices in violent relationships many violent relationships are characterized by a high degree of cyclicality women who are the victims of domestic violence often leave and return multiple times to explain this we develop a model of time inconsistent preferences in the context of domestic violence this time inconsistency generates a demand for commitment we present supporting evidence that women in violent relationships display time inconsistent preferences by examining their demand for commitment devices we find that no drop policies which compel the prosecutor to continue with prosecution even if the victim expresses a desire to drop the charges result in an increase in reporting no drop policies also result in a decrease in the number of men murdered by intimates suggesting that some women in violent relationships move away from an extreme type of commitment device when a less costly one is offered

the gender wage gap and domestic violence three quarters of all violence against women is perpetrated by domestic partners this study exploits exogenous changes in the demand for labor in female dominated industries to estimate the impact of the male female wage gap on domestic violence decreases in the wage gap reduce violence against women consistent with a household bargaining model these findings shed new light on the health production process as well as observed income gradients in health and suggest that in addition to addressing concerns of equity and efficiency pay parity can also improve the health of american women via reductions in violence

women and affirmative action abstract this paper reviews evidence indicating that as it has been enforced so far affirmative action has contributed negligibly to women s progress in the workplace affirmative action can be modeled as a tax on employers whose female employment growth falls below a certain rate clearly if labor supply shifts result in female employment growth greater than the regulatory standard the tax constraint will not be binding as we shall see this may help explain an affirmative action program that is generally ineffective for women although it has been effective for minorities federal anti bias policies in general and the system of affirmative action goals in particular have been accused of instituting employment quotas this paper reviews evidence on the homogenization of the workplace predicted by the quota theory as well as considering more direct evidence on whether affirmative action goals are really quotas in lambs clothing i shall also review the slim evidence on the most fundamental and co

domestic violence and divorce law when divorce threats become credible the cost of divorce influences the bargaining position of spouses and thus their behavior within the marriage this study takes advantage of a major and unexpected reduction in divorce costs in spain to estimate the causal effects on domestic violence results suggest a 30 decline in spousal conflict as a consequence of the reform spousal violence is found to have decreased among couples who remained married after the modification in the law which suggests an important role for changes in bargaining within the marriage when divorce becomes a more credible cheaper option

sheltering in place and domestic violence evidence from calls for service during covid 19 the covid 19 pandemic has led to an economic slowdown as more people practice social distancing and shelter at home the increase in family isolation unemployment and economic stress has the potential to increase domestic violence we document the pandemic s impact on police calls for service for domestic violence the pandemic increased domestic violence calls by 7 5 during march through may of 2020 with effects concentrated during the first five weeks after social distancing began the increase in reported domestic violence incidents began before official stay at home orders were mandated it is not driven by any particular demographic group but does appear to be driven by households without a previous history of domestic violence

on the evidence of a working spouse penalty in the managerial labor market this analysis of march 1993 current population survey data suggests that managers with working wives earn lower wages than their counterparts with non working wives the labor supply decisions of managers wives appear to be unaffected by that is exogenous with respect to their husbands wages in contrast there is evidence that the labor supply decisions of non managers wives are affected by their husbands wages and when the analysis takes account of that endogeneity it is found that non managers do not suffer a working spouse penalty the analysis also highlights some important issues related to the use of instrumental variables

local labor markets and welfare spells do demand conditions matter this paper examines the impact of changes in labor market conditions on participation in the aid to families with dependent children afdc program in california transitions off welfare and transi

bargaining in the shadow of the law divorce laws and family distress this paper exploits the variation occurring from the different timing of divorce law reforms across the united states to evaluate how unilateral divorce changed family violence and whether the option provided by unilateral divorce reduced suicide and spousal homicide unilateral divorce both potentially increases the likelihood that a domestic violence relationship ends and acts to transfer bargaining power toward the abused thereby potentially stopping the abuse in extant relationships in states that introduced unilateral divorce we find a 8 16 percent decline in female suicide roughly a 30 percent decline in domestic violence for both men and women and a 10 percent decline in females murdered by their partners

the rise in the disability rolls and the decline in unemployment between 1984 and 2001 the share of nonelderly adults receiving social security disability insurance income di rose by 60 percent to 5 3 million beneficiaries rapid program growth despite improving aggregate health appears to be explained by reduced screening stringency declining demand for less skilled workers and an unforeseen increase in the earnings replacement rate we estimate that the sum of these forces doubled the labor force exit propensity of displaced high school dropouts after 1984 lowering measured u s unemployment by one half a percentage point steady state calculations augur a further 40 percent increase in the rate of di receipt

employment and the risk of domestic violence does the breadwinner s gender matter abstractthis article studies the effect on the risk of female victimization of the employment status of the woman and her partner we use individual level data from the violence against women surveys for spain which also provide information on income and a rich set of sociodemographic characteristics to address the potential endogeneity of the binary employment indicators we exploit exogenous geographical information on the employment and unemployment rates by gender and age within a multivariate probit framework our estimation results show that male partner employment plays a major role in the risk of physical violence while female employment only lowers it when her partner is employed too the lowest risk appears for more egalitarian couples in which both partners are employed

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

an economic approach to social capital a standard optimal investment model can be used to analyse an individual s decision to accumulate social capital we analyse six facts that support the predictions of this individual based approach 1 social capital first rises and then falls with age 2 social capital declines with expected mobility 3 social capital rises in occupations with greater returns to social skills 4 social capital is higher among homeowners 5 social connections fall sharply with physical distance 6 people who invest in human capital also invest in social capital we fail to find robust evidence that social capital investments fall with the value of time or that geographic religious groups generate social capital complementarities

international migration and the role of institutions we study the determinants of international migration with special attention to the role of institutional factors other than economic and demographic fundamentals we evaluate the impact of political institutions and of those institutions specifically targeted at attracting migrants for a dataset on 19th century migration we find that economic and demographic differentials play a major role but that the quality of institutions also matter we produce evidence that both political and migration institutions represent significant factors of attraction even after controlling for their potential endogeneity through a set of instruments exploiting colonial history and the institutions inherited from the past

reducing public private sector pay differentials the single spine pay policy as a natural experiment in ghana empirical studies have documented the existence of the public private pay differentials in both developed and developing countries the implementation of policies aiming to reduce this gap has however been mitigated or inconclusive this paper exploits the single spine pay policy sspp in ghana as a natural experiment to examine the effectiveness of wage policies in developing countries the sspp was implemented in 2010 by the government of ghana to address the public private sector wage gap and improve productivity in the public sector using a quantile treatment effect approach based on a difference in difference did estimation we show that the sspp has yet to reduce the wage gap between the public and private sectors across the entire distribution of earnings in ghana the improvement observed is only at the lower tail of the distribution of earnings however the sspp has a larger effect on the earnings of female workers than that of males in the education and health services sector suggesting that the policy was successful in reducing the gender wage gap in that sector moreover the sspp has decreased the productivity of workers across the distribution of earnings mainly due to a decrease in the effort of female public sector workers nevertheless the sspp has had some successes and could be improved by putting in place a good managerial quality in the government agencies in addition it is important that the government pays much attention to various macroeconomic factors that have challenged the success of the sspp

can alcohol prohibition reduce violence against women violence against women is a critical problem across the world in this paper we exploit state and temporal variation in alcohol control in india to examine the impact of prohibition on alcohol consumption and violent crimes against women we first use detailed household survey data to show that prohibition policies are associated with substantially lower rates of drinking among men and domestic violence next we provide evidence that alcohol prohibition reduces aggregate violence against women in officially reported crime data the results suggest that policies that restrict access to alcohol may help reduce gender violence

the sensitivity of an empirical model of married women s hours of work to economic and statistical assumptions this study undertakes a systematic analysis of several theoretic and statistical assumption s used in many empirical models of female labor supply using a singl e data set psid 1975 labor supply data the author is able to replic ate most of the range of estimated income and substitution effects fo und in previous studies in this field he undertakes extensive specif ication tests and finds that most of this range should be rejected du e to statistical and model misspecifications the two most important assumptions appear to be the tobit assumption used to control for sel f selection into the labor force and exogeneity assumptions on the wi fe s wage rate and her labor market experience copyright 1987 by the econometric society

the internal economics of the firm evidence from personnel data we analyze twenty years of personnel data from one firm the hierarchical structure is quite simple and stable career movements suggest that the employee s rate of learning and the firm s learning about ability are important there are promotion fast tracks exit rates vary little with tenure or salary the firm has personnel policies like those described in the internal labor markets literature although several theoretical preconditions for ilms such as ports of entry and exit are lacking job levels are important to compensation but there is also substantial individual variation in pay within levels our companion paper in this issue explores the wage policy of this firm

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

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

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

do men whose wives work really earn less it is common knowledge among empirical labor economists that household status variables can enter significantly in wage equations in particular a substantial marital wage premium for men has been noted recently a series of articles in the management literature has argued that an even larger premium accrues to those married men whose wives do not work for pay single earner husbands our current study arises in response to perceived deficiencies in the conceptual framework and statistical methods used in these studies

the enfranchisement of women and the welfare state abstract we offer a rationale for the decision to extend the franchise to women within a politico economic model where men are richer than women women display a higher preference for public goods and women s disenfranchisement carries a societal cost men and women are matched within households which are the center of the decision process we derive the optimal tax rate under two alternative regimes a males only enfranchisement regime and a universal enfranchisement regime the latter is associated with a higher tax rate but as industrialization raises the reward to intellectual labor relative to physical labor women s relative wage increases thus decreasing the difference between the tax rates when the cost of disenfranchisement becomes higher than the cost of the higher tax rate which applies under universal enfranchisement the male median voter is better off extending the franchise to women a consequent expansion of the size of government is only to be expected in societies with a relatively high cost of disenfranchisement we empirically test the implications of the model over the 1870 1930 period we proxy the gender wage gap with the level of per capita income and the cost of disenfranchisement with the presence of catholicism which is associated with a more traditional view of women s role and thus a lower cost the gender gap in the preferences for public goods is proxied by the availability of divorce which implies marital instability and a more vulnerable economic position for women consistently with the model s predictions women s suffrage is correlated positively with per capita income and negatively with the presence of catholicism and the availability of divorce while women s suffrage increases the size of government only in non catholic countries

the influence of non pecuniary factors on labor supply the case of navy enlisted personnel this paper expresses the elasticity of labor supply to an occupation in terms of the variances and covariances of the distributions of non pecuniary factors across the alternative occupations we then apply our results to an analysis of reenlistment rates among navy enlisted personnel we argue that those navy skills experiencing a higher incidence of sea duty will have lower pay elasticities this prediction is confirmed empirically using probit analysis

shared agency the dominant spouse s impact on education expenditure summary in this paper we consider whether it is the gender of the decision maker or the extent of agency that they wield that is crucial to increasing household welfare this is an important question as development policy is often formed on the basis that placing resources in the hands of women results in greater household welfare indonesia provides the ideal opportunity to study this issue because it is home to ethnic groups with very different gender norms from male dominance the patrilineal batak to female dominance the matrilineal minangkabau using ifls data for three rounds we consider the impact of decision making by the dominant spouse on household expenditure on education we find that in indonesia when the dominant spouse male or female has sole control of decision making there is an overall negative impact on education expenditure this leads us to argue that it is more important to consider the issue of spousal dominance than to wholly focus on gender

a theory of compensation and personnel policy in hierarchical organizations with application to the united states military a large literature attempts to explain compensation and personnel policies in large organizations three features of the u s military system flat rank spreads in pay a relatively generous pension and heavy reliance on up or out promotions are at variance with common practices in large civilian organizations this article develops a model of individual decision making in a large hierarchical organization and uses the model to explain these apparent puzzles the lack of lateral entry and heterogeneity in entrants abilities and preferences for military service play key roles in the observed policies

the southern wage gap human capital and the quality of education this suggests that school quality can play an important role in explaining the racial wage gap welch 28 and smith 19 both provide anecdotal evidence that relates the narrowing of school quality to the falling racial gap in earnings the rising rate of return for black workers on years of school documented by weiss and williamson 27 welch 28 and smith and welch 20 also is consistent with the improving quality of their education nevertheless school quality has not been incorporated into systematic statistical analysis of the racial wage gap this is the main focus of this paper i examine 15 southern states which had data on the segregated white and black school systems i have attempted to link the demonstrated lower quality of education during segregation in the south to the persistent southern wage gap in addition i have tried to

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

the timing of welfare payments and intimate partner violence i examine transfer schedules for the temporary assistance for needy families tanf program and find a causal relationship between the time directly after welfare payments and intimate partner violence against women this study supports the hypothesis that the husband uses threats of violence as an instrument to gain control over the allocation of household resources and suggests that the increased incidence in physical violence after welfare payments is associated with alcohol use additionally i find that states that pay tanf recipients twice a month do not have this effect on threats of violence this suggests that smaller more frequent payments may reduce the husband s incentive to use verbal violence as a bargaining tool jel i38 j18 j12

women as agents of change female income and mobility in india economic globalization will give many women in developing countries access to steady and relatively remunerative employment for the first time potentially shifting bargaining power within their households and changing the choices that are made for their children this paper exploits a unique setting a group of tea plantations in south india where women are employed in permanent wage labor and where incomes do not vary by caste to anticipate the impact of globalization on mobility across social groups in the future the main result of the paper is that a relative increase in female income weakens the family s ties to the ancestral community and the traditional economy but these mobility enhancing effects are obtained for certain historically disadvantaged castes alone although the paper provides a context specific explanation for why the women from these castes emerge as agents of change the first general implication of the analysis is that the incentive and the ability of women to use their earnings to influence household decisions depends importantly on their social background the second implication is that historically disadvantaged groups may in fact be especially responsive to new opportunities precisely because they have fewer ties to the traditional economy to hold them back

a cure for discrimination affirmative action and the case of california s proposition 209 proposition 209 enacted in california in 1996 and made effective the following year ended state affirmative action programs not only in education but also for public employment and government contracting this paper uses cps data and triple difference techniques to take advantage of the natural experiment presented by this change in state law to gauge the labor market impacts of ending affirmative action programs employment among women and minorities dropped sharply a change that was nearly completely explained by a decline in participation rather than by increases in unemployment this decline suggests that either affirmative action programs in california had been inefficient or that they failed to create lasting change in prejudicial attitudes

the effect of court ordered hiring quotas on the composition and quality of police arguably the most aggressive armative action program ever implemented in the united states was a series of court ordered racial hiring quotas imposed on municipal police departments my best estimate of the eect of court ordered armative action on workforce composition is a 14

gender and job performance evidence from wall street this study concerns the relationship between gender and job performance among brokerage firm equity analysts women s representation in analyst positions dropped from 16 percent in 1995 to 14 percent in 2005 the study found significant gender based differences in performance on various dimensions for example women cover roughly 9 stocks on average as compared with 10 for men and women s earnings estimates tend to be less accurate than men s estimates but the study also found that women are significantly more likely than men to be designated as all stars which indicates that they outperform men in other aspects of job performance