Aloe vera and carrageenan based edible film improves storage stability of ice-cream

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Caste, Female Labor Supply and the Gender Wage Gap in India: Boserup Revisited

The gender wage gap is notable not just for its persistence and ubiquity but also for its variation across regions. A natural question is how greater work participation by women matters to female wages and the gender wage gap. Within India, a seeming paradox is that gender differentials in agricultural wage are the largest in southern regions of India that are otherwise favorable to women. Boserup (1970) hypothesized that this is due to greater labor force participation by women in these regions. This is not obvious as greater female labor supply could depress male wage as well. Other factors also need to be controlled for in the analyses. This paper undertakes a formal test of the Boserup proposition. We find that differences in female labor supply are able to explain 55 percent of the gender wage gap between northern and southern states of India

Evolution of wage inequality in India (1983-2017): The role of occupational task content

We examine data for urban workers in the non-agricultural sector across three decades, 1983-2017, and find that earnings inequality increased during 1983-2004, was largely stable during 2004-11, and decreased during 2011-17. We explore whether decline in routine jobs and change in demand for skills has shaped evolution of earnings inequality in India. We rule out earnings polarization as an explanation for rising earnings inequality during 1983-2004, and then use Shapley and recentred influence functions (RIF) decomposition methods to decompose the change in Gini into the contribution from change in worker demographics and routine task intensity and the accompanying changes in returns to these characteristics. Our results show that changes in returns to education and routine task intensity explain a small part of the trends in wage inequality. Hence, in the Indian context, institutional factors may have played a bigger role in shaping wage inequality

What Determines Women's Labor Supply? The Role of Home Productivity and Social Norms

We highlight the role of home productivity in explaining the gender gap in labor force participation (LFP), and the non-monotonic relationship of women's LFP with their education in developing countries (India) in contrast to the developed economies (United Kingdom, U.K.). We construct a model of couples' time allocation decisions allowing for both market and home productivity to improve with own education. Our theoretical predictions match the data for India at low levels of women's education but over-predict labor supply at higher levels, unlike the U.K.. Incorporating constraints imposed by social norms regarding the gendered division of labor shows that norms can act as a binding constraint, producing much smaller increases in women's labor supply to market work at higher education levels in transition economies. Our analysis suggests that home productivity, along with social norms regarding couples' time allocation, can be critical determinants of women's labor supply in developing countries

Minimum Wages and Changing Wage Inequality in India

Using nationally representative data on employment and earnings, this paper documents a fall in wage inequality in India over the last two decades. It then examines the role played by increasing minimum wages for the lowest skilled workers in India in contributing to the observed decline. Exploiting regional variation in changes in minimum wages over time in the country, we find that an increase in minimum wages by one percent led to an increase in wages for workers in the lowest quintile by 0.17%. This effect is smaller at upper wage quintiles and insignicant for the highest wage quintile. Counterfactual wage estimations show that the increase in minimum wages explains 26% of the decline in wage inequality in India during 1999-2018. These findings underscore the important role played by rising minimum wages in reducing wage disparities in India

Using Domain-Specific Word Embeddings to Examine the Demand for Skills

We study the demand for skills by using text analysis methods on job descriptions in a large volume of ads posted on an online Indian job portal. We make use of domain-specific unlabeled data to obtain word vector representations (i.e., word embeddings) and discuss how these can be leveraged for labor market research. We start by carrying out a data-driven categorization of required skill words and construct gender associations of different skill categories using word embeddings. Next, we examine how different required skill categories correlate with log posted wages as well as explore how skills demand varies with firm size. We find that female skills are associated with lower posted wages, potentially contributing to observed gender wage gaps. We also find that large firms require a more extensive range of skills, implying that complementarity between female and male skills is greater among these firms

Gendering Technological Change: Evidence from Agricultural Mechanization

Technological change in production processes with gendered division of labor across tasks, such as agriculture, can have a differential impact on women's and men's labor. Using exogenous variation in the extent of loamy soil, which is more amenable to deep tillage than clayey soil and therefore more likely to see adoption of tractor driven equipment for primary tilling, we show that mechanization has led to significantly greater decline in women's than men's labor on Indian farms. Reduced demand for labor in weeding, a task that requires precision and is thus more often undertaken by women, explains our findings. The estimates suggest that increased mechanized tilling led to a more than 22% fall in women's agricultural labor in India during 1999-2011. Our results highlight the gendered impact of technological change in contexts where there is sex-specific specialization of labor