Earnings Effects of Sexual Orientation Revisited: Evidence from the CPS

Objective. To measure the wage premium or penalty associated with sexual orientation of partnered lesbians and gays and to compare these estimates with those produced using smaller sample sizes and alternative definitions of homosexuality. Data Source and Sampling Methods. Data are drawn from the Current Population Survey, produced by the U.S. Census Bureau. Extracting household information from the out-going March rotation provides a sample of 37,000 households interviewed in the years 1995 and 2000. Only workers living with a partner are included in the analysis. Study Design. Following the methodology used by Black et al. (2003), this study uses a Mincerian wage regression to determine the effect of demographic and employment characteristics on earnings. A respondent’s sexual orientation is determined by marital status and whether or not they live with a partner of the same sex. With logged wages as the dependent variable, I estimate the effect of sexual orientation on earnings using an ordinary least squares regression. I run two regressions for each gender: one with controls for occupation and one without. Demographic control variables are: education, potential experience, race/ethnicity, and the region in which the respondent resides. Principal Findings. Not controlling for occupation, gay partnered couples earn more than similar heterosexual married couples, although this effect is stronger for men than for women. Controlling for occupation, being gay still has a positive and significant effect on men’s earnings. Once occupation is added, however, there is a positive effect of being gay on women’s earnings, but this effect is no longer statistically significant. Conclusion. Homosexuals living with a partner earn significantly higher wages than those in heterosexual partnerships. This wage premium diminishes slightly when controlling for a worker’s occupation and remains statistically significant for men. These results are consistent with various hypotheses of the effect of sexual orientation on labor market outcomes. It also suggests that lesbians earn a wage premium because they tend to cluster into higher paying occupations

Transcriptional and metabolic signatures of Arabidopsis responses to chewing damage by an insect herbivore and bacterial infection and the consequences of their interaction

Plants use multiple interacting signaling systems to identify and respond to biotic stresses. Although it is often assumed that there is specificity in signaling responses to specific pests, this is rarely examined outside of the gene-for-gene relationships of plant-pathogen interactions. In this study, we first compared early events in gene expression and later events in metabolite profiles of Arabidopsis thaliana following attack by either the caterpillar Spodoptera exigua or avirulent (DC3000 avrRpm1) Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato at three time points. Transcriptional responses of the plant to caterpillar feeding were rapid, occurring within 1 h of feeding, and then decreased at 6 and 24 h. In contrast, plant response to the pathogen was undetectable at 1 h but grew larger and more significant at 6 and 24 h. There was a surprisingly large amount of overlap in jasmonate and salicylate signaling in responses to the insect and pathogen, including levels of gene expression and individual hormones. The caterpillar and pathogen treatments induced different patterns of expression of glucosinolate biosynthesis genes and levels of glucosinolates. This suggests that when specific responses develop, their regulation is complex and best understood by characterizing expression of many genes and metabolites. We then examined the effect of feeding by the caterpillar Spodoptera exigua on Arabidopsis susceptibility to virulent (DC3000) and avirulent (DC3000 avrRpm1) P. syringae pv. tomato, and found that caterpillar feeding enhanced Arabidopsis resistance to the avirulent pathogen and lowered resistance to the virulent strain. We conclude that efforts to improve plant resistance to bacterial pathogens are likely to influence resistance to insects and vice versa. Studies explicitly comparing plant responses to multiple stresses, including the role of elicitors at early time points, are critical to understanding how plants organize responses in natural settings.Peer reviewedBiochemistry and Molecular Biolog