Gender and the Labour Market: An International Perspective and the Case of Italy

This paper provides an overview of the literature on international differences in the gender wage gap. It then focuses on the Italian case and analyzes differentials in gender wage and employment gaps across regions. The cross-regional variation reproduces the negative correlation between gender wage and employment gaps observed at the cross-country level. Using the methodology in Olivetti and Petrongolo (2008), the paper shows the importance of regional differentials in sample selection induced by non-employment in accounting for this phenomenon.

Change in Women's Labor Force Participation: The Effect of Changing Experience

Over the past two decades married women's labor force participation has shown a considerable increase in the US. In particular, both the cross sectional and the life cycle behavior of married women's hours worked has undergone a substantial change. I show that a key factor underlying this trend is the change in behavior for married women with children. In particular, while in the past married women of childbearing age used to specialize in childrearing and homeproduction activities at the expense of engaging in market work, they now do not curb their labor participation. What gives rise to this change in behavior? In this paper I focus on relative changes in returns to experience as an explanation. In particular, I quantitatively assess the contribution of changes in the return to experience to the change in married women's life-cycle profiles of hours worked. I build a life-cycle model with human capital accumulation and home production in which the basic unit of analysis are married couples with children, and calibrate it using data from the 1970s and the 1990s. I show that changes in returns to experience can account for a large part of observed changes. I also demonstrate that decreases in the gender wage gap cannot account for much of the change in the shape of life cycle profiles for women.

In the name of the Father: marriage and intergenerational mobility in the United States, 1850-1930

This paper constructs a continuous and consistent measure of intergenerational mobility in the United States between 1850 and 1930 by linking individuals with the same first name across pairs of decennial Censuses. One of the advantages of this methodology is that it allows to calculate intergenerational correlations not only between fathers and sons, but also between fathers-in-law and sons-in-law, something that is typically not possible with historical data. Thus, the paper sheds light on the role of marriage in the intergenerational transmis- sion of economic status from a historical perspective. We find that the father-son correlation in economic status grows throughout the period, but is consistently lower than the correlation between fathers-in-law and sons-in-law. The gap declines over time, and seems to have closed by the end of the period. We present a simple model of investment in human capital, marital sorting and intergenerational mobility that can rationalize the ?ndings

Gender Gaps across Countries and Skills: Supply, Demand and the Industry Structure

The gender wage gap varies widely across countries and across skill groups within countries. Interestingly, there is a positive cross-country correlation between the unskilled-to-skilled gender wage gap and the corresponding gap in hours worked. Based on a canonical supply and demand framework, this positive correlation would reveal the presence of net demand forces shaping gender differences in labor market outcomes across skills and countries. We use a simple multi-sector framework to illustrate how differences in labor demand for different inputs can be driven by both within-industry and between-industry factors. The main idea is that, if the service sector is more developed in the US than in continental Europe, and unskilled women tend to be over-represented in this sector, we expect unskilled women to suffer a relatively large wage and/or employment penalty in the latter than in the former. We find that, overall, the between-industry component of labor demand explains more than half of the total variation in labor demand between the US and the majority of countries in our sample, as well as one-third of the correlation between wage and hours gaps. The between-industry component is relatively more important in countries where the relative demand for unskilled females is lowest.gender gaps, education, demand and supply, industry structure

Gender Gaps Across Countries and Skills: Supply, Demand and the Industry Structure

The gender wage gap varies widely across countries and across skill groups within countries. Interestingly, there is a positive cross-country correlation between the unskilled- to-skilled gender wage gap and the corresponding gap in hours worked. Based on a canonical supply and demand framework, this positive correlation would reveal the presence of net demand forces shaping gender differences in labor market outcomes across skills and countries. We use a simple multi-sector framework to illustrate how differences in labor demand for different inputs can be driven by both within-industry and between-industry factors. The main idea is that, if the service sector is more developed in the US than in continental Europe, and unskilled women tend to be over-represented in this sector, we expect unskilled women to suffer a relatively large wage and/or employment penalty in the latter than in the former. We find that, overall, the between-industry component of labor demand explains more than half of the total variation in labor demand between the US and the majority of countries in our sample, as well as one-third of the correlation between wage and hours gaps. The between-industry component is relatively more important in countries where the relative demand for unskilled females is lowest.gender gaps, education, demand and supply, industry structure

Unequal Pay or Unequal employment? A Cross-Country Analysis of Gender Gaps

There is evidence of a negative cross-country correlation between gender wage and employment gaps. We argue that non-random selection of women into work explains an important part of such correlation and thus of the observed variation in wage gaps. The idea is that, if women who are employed tend to have relatively high-wage characteristics, low female employment rates may become consistent with low gender wage gaps simply because low-wage women would not feature in the observed wage distribution. We explore this idea across the US and EU countries estimating gender gaps in potential wages. We recover information on wages for those not in work in a given year using alternative imputation techniques. Imputation is based on (i) wage observations from nearest available waves in the sample, (ii) observable characteristics of the nonemployed and (iii) a statistical repeated-sampling model. We then estimate median wage gaps on the resulting imputed wage distributions, thus simply requiring assumptions on the position of the imputed wage observations with respect to the median, but not on their level. We obtain higher median wage gaps on imputed rather than actual wage distributions for most countries in the sample. However, this difference is small in the US, the UK and most central and northern EU countries, and becomes sizeable in Ireland, France and southern EU, all countries in which gender employment gaps are high. In particular, correction for employment selection explains more than a half of the observed correlation between wage and employment gaps.median gender gaps, sample selection, wage imputation

Home Production, Market Production and the Gender Wage Gap: Incentives and Expectations

The purpose of this paper is to study the joint determination of gender differentials in labor market outcomes and in the household division of labor. Specifically, we explore the hypothesis that incentive problems in the labor market amplify differences in earnings due to gender differentials in home hours. In turn, earnings differentials reinforce the division of labor within the household, leading to a potentially self-fulfilling feedback mechanism. The workings of the labor market are key in our story. The main assumptions are that the utility cost of work effort is increasing in home hours, and that higher effort should correspond to higher incentive pay. Household decisions are Pareto efficient, leading to a negative correlation between relative home hours and earnings across spouses. We use the Census and the PSID to study these predictions and find that they are supported by the data.

In the name of the son (and the daughter): intergenerational mobility in the United States, 1850-1940

This paper estimates historical intergenerational elasticities between fathers and children of both sexes in the United States using a novel empirical strategy. The key insight of our approach is that the information about socioeconomic status conveyed by first names can be used to create pseudo-links across generations. We find that both father-son and father-daughter elasticities were flat during the nineteenth century, increased sharply between 1900 and 1920, and declined slightly thereafter. We discuss the role of regional disparities in economic development, trends in inequality and returns to human capital, and the marriage market in explaining these patterns

Three-generation mobility in the United States, 1850-1940: the role of maternal and paternal grandparents

This paper estimates intergenerational elasticities across three generations in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, exploring how maternal and paternal grandfathers predict the economic status of their grandsons and granddaughters. We document that the relationship between the income of grandparents and grandchildren differs by gender. The socio-economic status of grandsons is more strongly associated with the status of paternal grandfathers than maternal grandfathers. The status of maternal grandfathers is more strongly correlated with the status of granddaughters than grandsons, while the opposite is true for paternal grandfathers. We argue that the findings can be rationalized by a model of gender-specific intergenerational transmission of traits and imperfect assortative mating.Accepted manuscrip

Marrying Your Mom: Preference Transmission and Women's Labor and Education Choices

This paper argues that the evolution of male preferences contributed to the dramatic increase in the proportion of working and educated women in the population over time. Male preferences evolved because some men experienced a different family model one in which their mother was skilled and/or worked. These men, we hypothesize, were more inclined to marry women who themselves were skilled or worked. Our model endogenizes the evolution of preferences in a dynamic setting and examines how it affected women's education and labor choices. We present empirical evidence based on GSS data that favors our transmission mechanism. We show that men whose mothers were more educated or worked are more likely to marry similar women themselves.