Female Labor Supply Differences by Sexual Orientation: A Semi-Parametric Decomposition Approach

Using 2000 U.S. Census data we illustrate the importance of accounting for household specialization in lesbian couples when examining the sexual orientation gap in female labor supply. Specifically, we find the labor supply gap is substantially larger between married women and partnered lesbian women who specialize in market production (primary earners) than between married women and partnered lesbian women who specialize in household production (secondary earners). Using a semi-parametric decomposition approach, we further show that the role of children in explaining the mean labor supply gap by sexual orientation is greatly understated if the household division of labor between household and market production is not taken into account. Finally, we illustrate that controlling for children significantly reduces differences between married women and secondary lesbian earners both in terms of the decision to remain attached to the labor market (the extensive margin), as well as in terms of annual hours of work conditional on working (the intensive margin). Further, the effect of controlling for children is not uniform across the distribution of conditional annual hours; instead it primarily reduces the percentage of secondary lesbian earners working extremely high annual hours.household specialization, female labor supply, sexual orientation

Empirical Methods in the Economics of International Immigration

In this chapter we provide a brief overview of the main empirical tools used by economists to study international migration. We begin by exploring the three broad research areas that economists examine when researching immigration. We then explore the strengths and shortcomings of the standard methods, and highlight new methods that will likely become more common in future work in the field. We divide the most common tools used in the empirical literature into four broad categories: (1) Ordinary Least Squares and Inference, (2) Difference-in-Difference Estimation, (3) Instrumental Variables Techniques, and (4) Recent Developments and Distributional Estimators. We use recent empirical work to highlight and explain each method, and provide sources for researchers interested in further information on each topic.empirical methods, immigration

The Business Boost from Marriage Equality: Evidence from the Health and Marriage Equality in Massachusetts Survey

This brief draws on two sources of data, a survey and state-collected tax revenue data, and finds that marriages have had a positive economic effect on Massachusetts -- likely providing a boost of over $100 million to the state economy. Same-sex couples' weddings injected significant spending into the Massachusetts economy and brought out-of-state guests to the state, whose spending also added to the economic boost

The Impact on Maine's Budget of Allowing Same-Sex Couples to Marry

This analysis estimates the impact of allowing same-sex couples to marry on Maine's state budget. We estimate that allowing same-sex couples to marry will result in a net gain of approximately $7.9 million each year for the State. This net impact will be the result of savings in expenditures on state means-tested public benefits programs and an increase in revenue from state sales and income taxes and marriage license fees. Throughout this report, we estimate the economic impact of weddings conservatively. In other words, we choose assumptions that are cautious from the State's perspective in that they tend to produce lower revenues and higher expenditures given the range of possibilities. Even so, we find that the effect of allowing same-sex couples to marry in Maine is an annual positive fiscal impact of approximately$7.9 million

Sexual Orientation Wage Gap: The Role of Occupational Sorting and Human Capital

Using data from the 2000 U.S. Census, the authors explore two alternative explanations for the sexual orientation wage gap: occupational sorting, and human capital differences. They find that lesbian women earned more than heterosexual women irrespective of marital status, while gay men earned less than their married heterosexual counterparts but more than their cohabitating heterosexual counterparts. Results of a Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition indicate that the relative wage advantages observed for some groups of lesbians and gay men were mainly owing to greater levels of human capital accumulation (particularly education), while occupational sorting had little or no influence. The relative wage penalties that were observed in other cases, however, cannot be attributed either to differences in occupational sorting or to human capital. An analysis employing a DiNardo, Fortin, and Lemieux decomposition, which allows for variation in the wage gap at different points along the wage distribution, broadly confirms these results

Wage inequality and the role of pre-market skills

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2005.Includes bibliographical references.This dissertation consists of three empirical studies, each using a measure of pre-market skills to examine an aspect of wage inequality in the U.S. labor market. Chapter One analyzes the factors associated with the change in the gender wage gap for young workers. I decompose the change in the gender wage gap over the entire wage distribution into factors associated with education, pre-market skills and the minimum wage. Improvements in education explain nearly all of the fall in the gap for the top three quarters of the distribution, leaving a small role for beneficial unexplained factors that led to excess shrinking of the gap. Women in the bottom quarter of the distribution actually experienced residual increases in the gender wage gap, and the gap rose outright for women in the bottom decile of the distribution. The fall in the real value of the minimum wage is discussed as a plausible explanation for the residual increase in the gender wage gap for low-earning women. Chapter Two evaluates the increase in the return to college between 1979 and 1999. Improved sorting of highly skilled individuals into college over the period implies that the composition of unobserved skill across education groups is not time invariant. Despite the increase in college attendance, college degree holders in 1999 had higher measures of pre-market skills than degree holders in 1979. For new labor market entrants, improved skill sorting accounts for four to nine percent of the increase in the return to college over the period. Accounting for improved sorting and the increased return to these skills reduces the estimated increase in the return to college by one third for males and one sixth for females.(cont.) Chapter Three explores the wage premium associated with on-the-job computer use. I show the computer wage premium does not appear to be simply the result of a spurious correlation with typically unobserved cognitive and interpersonal skills. For males and females, the return to on-the-job computer use falls by less than 15% after controlling for worker heterogeneity in pre-market skills. Controlling for education, workers using a computer at work do not receive a higher wage premium for their other productive skills.by Michael Douglas Steinberger.Ph.D