Gender, Occupation Choice and the Risk of Death at Work

Women and men tend to work in different occupations. Although a great deal of research has been devoted to the measurement of trends in occupation segregation by gender, very little work has focused on the underlying job choice process that generates this segregation. What makes men and women choose the jobs they do? Using employment data from the 1995 - 1998 Current Population Surveys and data on occupational injuries and deaths from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we estimate conditional logit models of occupation choice as a function of the risk of work-related death and other job characteristics. Our results suggest that women choose safer jobs than men. Within gender, we find that single moms or dads are most averse to fatal risk, presumably because they have the most to lose. The effect of parenthood on married women is larger than its effect on married men, which is consistent with the idea that men's contributions to raising children are more fully insured than women's. Overall, men and women's different preferences for risk can explain about one-quarter of the fact that men and women choose different occupations.

Family Structure and the Economic Mobility of Children

Compares the economic mobility, both absolute and relative, of children of continuously married mothers, divorced mothers, and unmarried mothers by race and family income level. Explores the role of racial differences in family structure and implications

What Do People Buy When They Don't Buy Health Insurance And What Does that Say about Why They are Uninsured?

Using data from the 1994 through 1998 Consumer Expenditure Surveys, we compare household spending on 16 different goods (food at home, food away from home, housing, transportation, alcohol and tobacco, interest, furniture and appliances, home maintenance, clothing, utilities, medical care, health insurance, entertainment, personal care, education, and other) for insured versus uninsured households, controlling for total expenditures and demographic characteristics. The analysis shows that the uninsured in the lowest quartile of the distribution of total expenditures spend more on housing, food at home, alcohol and tobacco, and education than do the insured. In contrast, households in the top quartile of the distribution of total expenditures spend more on transportation and furniture and appliances than do comparable insured households. These results are consistent with the idea that poor uninsured households face higher housing prices than do poor insured households. Further research is necessary to determine whether high housing prices can help explain why some households do not have insurance.

Family Structure and the Economic Wellbeing of Children

An extensive literature that examines the relationship between family structure and children's outcomes consistently shows that living with a single parent is associated with negative outcomes. Few studies, however, directly test the relationship between family structure and outcomes for the child once he/she reaches adulthood. We directly examine, using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, whether family structure during childhood is related to the child's economic wellbeing both during childhood as well as adulthood. Our findings suggest that the economic wellbeing of children of mothers who experience a marital dissolution and remarry are no different from the children of mothers who are continuously married. However, the children of mothers whose marriages dissolve but who do not remarry experience large declines in their income over their first ten years of life. We also show that while the children of never married mothers earn a lot less as adults than the children of married parents, these differences can largely be explained by demographic and socioeconomic factors. Finally, our findings suggest that children who have mothers who experience a marital dissolution and who do not remarry have economic losses that persist into adulthood. Robustness checks using family fixed effects models support this result

Polarization and Rising Wage Inequality: Comparing the U.S. and Germany

This paper compares trends in wage inequality in the U.S. and Germany using an approach developed by MaCurdy and Mroz (1995) to separate age, time, and cohort effects. Between 1979 and 2004, wage inequality increased strongly in both the U.S. and Germany but there were various country specific aspects of this increase. For the U.S., we find faster wage growth since the 1990s at the top (80% quantile) and the bottom (20% quantile) compared to the median of the wage distribution, which is evidence for polarization in the U.S. labor market. In contrast, we find little evidence for wage polarization in Germany. Moreover, we see a large role played by cohort effects in Germany, while we find only small cohort effects in the U.S. Employment trends in both countries are consistent with polarization since the 1990s. We conclude that although there is evidence in both the U.S. and Germany which is consistent with a technology-driven polarization of the labor market, the patterns of trends in wage inequality differ strongly enough that technology effects alone cannot explain the empirical findings.wage inequality, polarization, international comparison, cohort study, quantile regression

Stepping Stone or Dead End? The Effect of the EITC on Earnings Growth

While many studies have found that the EITC increases the employment rates of single mothers, no study to date has examined whether the jobs taken by single mothers as a result of the EITC incentives are "dead-end" jobs or jobs that have the potential for earnings growth. Using a panel of administrative earnings data linked to nationally representative survey data, we find no evidence that the EITC expansions between 1994 and 1996 induced single mothers to take "dead-end" jobs. If anything, the increase in earnings growth during the mid-to-late 1990s for single mothers who were particularly affected by the EITC expansion was higher than it was for other similar women. The EITC encourages work among single mothers, and that work continues to pay off through future increases in earnings.earned income tax credit, earnings, single mothers

IRAs and Household Saving Revisited: Some New Evidence

The effectiveness of tax-favored savings accounts in raising national savings depends crucially upon the willingness of households to reduce consumption in order to finance contributions to these accounts. The debate over the tax deductibility of IRA's has centered on whether IRA contributions represented new savings or reshuffled assets. We devise a test to distinguish between these two hypotheses where we compare the behavior of households which just opened an IRA account with that of households which already had an IRA account. Our test accounts for any unobservable heterogeneity across the two groups. We find evidence that supports the view that households financed their IRA contributions primarily through reductions in their stocks of other assets. Our results indicate that less than 20% of IRA contributions represented addition to national savings.

Polarization and rising wage inequality: comparing the U.S. and Germany

This paper compares trends in wage inequality in the U.S. and Germany using an approach developed by MaCurdy and Mroz (1995) to separate age, time, and cohort effects. Between 1979 and 2004, wage inequality increased strongly in both the U.S. and Germany but there were various country specific aspects of this increase. For the U.S., we find faster wage growth since the 1990s at the top (80% quantile) and the bottom (20% quantile) compared to the median of the wage distribution, which is evidence for polarization in the U.S. labor market. In contrast, we find little evidence for wage polarization in Germany. Moreover, we see a large role played by cohort effects in Germany, while we find only small cohort effects in the U.S.. Employment trends in both countries are consistent with polarization since the 1990s. We conclude that although there is evidence in both the U.S. and Germany which is consistent with a technology-driven polarization of the labor market, the patterns of trends in wage inequality differ strongly enough that technology effects alone cannot explain the empirical findings. --Wage Inequality,Polarization,International Comparison,Cohort Study,Quantile Regression

Medicaid Expansions and Fertility in the United States

Beginning in the mid 1980s and extending through the early to mid 1990s, a substantial number of women and children gained eligibility for Medicaid through a series of income-based expansions. Using natality data from the National Center for Health Statistics, we estimate fertility responses to these eligibility expansions. We measure changes in state Medicaid eligibility policy by simulating the fraction of a standard population that would qualify for benefits. From 1985 to 1996, the fraction of women aged 15 to 44 who were eligible for Medicaid coverage for a pregnancy increased on average by 24 percentage points. However, contrary to findings in the extant literature, our results do not indicate that this expansion in coverage had a statistically discernible effect on fertility.