title: Essays on lifetime labour market outcomes and gender
Creators: name: Marshan, Joseph
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 2024

description: This thesis studies the dynamics of lifetime labour market outcomes and related gender issues from three perspectives. Chapter 2 investigates the existence of an intergenerational link between women's labour supply decisions in Indonesia using rich large-scale longitudinal data known as the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS). This study contributes to limited empirical evidence on intergenerational links in female attachment to the labour market in the context of a developing country. In addition to cross-sectional correlation, I employ a permanent component approach (Chadwick and Solon, 2002; Galassi et al., 2024) to estimate the intergenerational correlation between mothers' and daughters' lifetime employment. I find that a mother's employment affects her daughter's employment decisions in the future. The probability of someone being employed during her lifetime is higher by 9% if she had an ever-employed mother compared to her peer who had a never-employed mother. Finally, I provide evidence that role-model effects and occupation-specific human capital transfers are the main plausible mechanisms behind the intergenerational correlation. This study highlights the challenges inherent in increasing the female labour supply in a society with slow-moving traditional norms. Chapter 3 provides empirical evidence of the long-term consequences of labour market entrance conditions using Indonesian data. I collect and harmonise a long series of the National Labour Force Survey (SAKERNAS) spanning over 30 years to construct a pseudo-panel cohort of new labour market entrants from 1990 to 2019. Following Oreopoulos et al. (2012), my preferred specification uses variation in the unemployment rate at the national level to test the existence of scarring effects. I find evidence of a scarring effect where a 1 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate at the year of labour market entrance causes about a 7% loss in probability of being employed full-time and about 21% potential monthly earnings loss. Compared to studies in developed countries, my findings suggest that scarring effects have smaller magnitudes and shorter spells. It also emerges that women and men share similar burdens in terms of negative employment effects, but slightly larger negative earning effects in terms of hourly wages. My results also suggest that those who completed secondary education bear the largest scarring effects compared to those with primary or tertiary education. This paper highlights the significance of youth-specific support as part of recovery policies after an economic downturn. Chapter 4 studies the labour market effects of bushfires and floods within Australia over the past two decades, focusing on gender as a determinant of vulnerability. Whilst floods unambiguously lifted the labour supply of both genders (creating around 13,500 jobs per year), the likelihood of female employment is particularly vulnerable to bushfires - lowering by 1.6 percentage points (or around 5,000 jobs per year). This effect is partially explained by the industry sector, with bushfires lifting overall male employment through industries including mining and transport, whilst reducing more female-dominated services sector participation. We also examine intrahousehold dynamics, finding strong evidence for an 'added worker' effect.