Wage Work for Women: The Menstrual Cycle and the Power of Water

We hypothesise that women's participation in wage (off-farm) work is reduced when their greater water needs due to the menstrual cycle are not met because their household has poor access to water. For testing, we use the data from rural villages in China. Controlling for village fixed effects, poor access to water is found to decrease the probability of wage work participation of affected (pre-menopause) women by about 10 percentage points, a large effect. As expected, there is no adverse causal impact of poor household access to water for women post-menopause, or for men, ceteris paribus.wage work, women, menopause, water engineering, rural development, China

The Gender Education Gap in China: The Power of Water

We investigate girls' school dropout rates, bringing forward a novel variable: access to water. We hypothesise that a girl's education suffers when her greater water need for female hygiene purposes after menarche is not met because her household has poor access to water. For testing we use data from rural villages in the China Health and Nutrition Survey. We find that menarche is associated with an increase in the school dropout rate, and indeed the effect is weaker for girls who have good access to water. Water engineering can thus contribute significantly to reducing gender education gaps in rural areas.education, gender gaps, menarche, water, China

Understanding the Labour Market for Older Workers: A Survey

The paper asks why retirement can be so abrupt in countries such as France (½% of the workforce over 65), yet staged in Japan (8% over 65). We find part of the answer in tax laws that prevent people working and receiving a pension, and make little allowance for fair pension increases if retirement is deferred. While these laws have begun to change, we find another part of the answer in employment protection laws. These laws coupled with inflexible collectively agreed wages make employers choosy about hiring the old. The advent of "age discrimination" law reinforces employment protection and may well reduce older workers' hiring opportunities especially where wages are rigid.mandatory retirement, deferred pay, age discrimination, older workers

Labour market regulation in the EU-15: causes and consequences - a survey

Why should floors be set under wages and working conditions by labour market regulations? This paper finds that efficiency arguments are questionable, because of the disemployment effects of strict regulation. Regulation is better explained in terms of the choices of the employed semi- and unskilled worker group. This group contains the median voter, who rationally desires strict regulation to divert rent from other groups such as the skilled workers and the unemployed. Legal origin may also be important: some countries have fallen under the influence of the interventionist French (or German) legal tradition. Given a predisposition to intervene, these countries begin with some degree of labour regulation, which then creates its own constituency of rent protectors and rent growers

Wage Dispersion in a Partially Unionized Labor Force

Taking as our point of departure a model proposed by David Card (2001), we suggest new methods for analyzing wage dispersion in a partially unionized labor market. Card's method disaggregates the labor population into skill categories, which procedure entails some loss of information. Accordingly, we develop a model in which each worker individually is assigned a union-membership probability and predicted union and nonunion wages. The model yields a natural three-way decomposition of variance. The decomposition permits counterfactual analysis, using concepts and techniques from the theory of factorial experimental design. We examine causes of the increase in U.K. wage dispersion between 1983 and 1995. Of the factors initially considered, the most influential was a change in the structure of remuneration inside both the union and nonunion sectors. Next in importance was the decrease in union membership. Finally, exogenous changes in labor force characteristics had, for most groups considered, only a small negative effect. We supplement this preliminary three-factorial analysis with a five-factorial analysis that allows us to examine effects from the wage-equation parameters in greater detail.wage dispersion, three-way variance decomposition, bivariate kernel density smoothing, union membership, deunionization, factorial experimental design

Job Satisfaction and the Labor Market Institutions in Urban China

The determinants of worker job satisfaction are estimated using a representative survey of three major cities in China. Legally segregated migrants, floaters, earn significantly less than otherwise equivalent non-migrants but routinely report greater job satisfaction, a finding not previously reported. We confirm a positive role for membership in the communist party but find that it exists only for non-migrants suggesting a club good aspect to membership. In contrast to earlier studies, many controls mirror those found in western democracies including the "paradox of the contented female worker."job satisfaction, internal migrants, party membership, China

Mandated benefits, welfare, and heterogeneous firms

The paper constructs an asymmetric information model to investigate the efficiency and equity cases for government mandated benefits. A mandate can improve workers? insurance, and may also redistribute in favor of more "deserving" workers. The risk is that it may also reduce output. The more diverse are free market contracts - separating the various worker types - the more likely it is that such output effects will on balance serve to reduce welfare. It is shown that adverse effects can be mitigated by restricting mandates to "large" firms. An alternative to a mandate is direct government provision. We demonstrate that direct government provision may be superior to mandates by virtue of preserving separations. --

Wage Dispersion in a Partially Unionized Labor Force

Wage Dispersion in a Partially Unionized Labor Force This paper critiques Card’s (2001) method for analyzing wage dispersion in a partially unionized labor market based on a disaggregation of the population into skill categories. We argue that disaggregation is a good idea, the use of skill categories less so. We offer a modified model in which each worker is assigned a union-membership probability, a predicted union wage, and a predicted nonunion wage. Our model provides a natural three-way decomposition of variance, and is also suited to counterfactual analysis. By way of an application, we examine the effect of de-unionization on wage dispersion in the United Kingdom between 1983 and 1995, reporting that the decline in membership accounts for only about one-fifth of the observed increase in wage dispersion.wage dispersion, three-way variance decomposition, bivariate kernel density smoothing, union membership, deunionization.

Real wage cyclicality in Italy

This paper analyzes the cyclical behaviour of male real wages in Italy using the European Community Household Panel 1994-2001. We distinguish between job stayers (remaining in the same job), and within- and between-company job movers. Stayers are the large majority. We find stayers in Northern Italy to have high cyclicality of real wages, higher in fact than the US and the UK. The Northern cyclicality is significant for all sub-samples (except for public sector workers), and higher in small firms, the private sector, and for temporary workers, as expected. In contrast, we find little wage cyclicality for any sub-group in the Centre-South, even for workers in small private sector firms. Evidently, labour markets in the North of Italy operate much more competitively than in the Centre and South

Management economics in a large retail organization

We study the impact of and reward to middle management ability using data from 245 stores of a nationwide retailer. The company scores six broad areas of management practice, the most important of which turns out to be commercial awareness, where able managers raise labour productivity by 17% compared to less able. We show that the managers' incentive scheme is implicitly an insurance one, with managers taking a share in deviations of actual sales from expected. At the same time, abler managers do not receive higher pay all else equal, which implies that middle management ability is not fully tradable