This paper examines whether firms use participation in work-family policies to screen for a worker’s level of job commitment, an unobservable characteristic that affects productivity. We identify two conditions that differentiate screening from human capital explanations, and test whether the wage penalty associated with usage varies with these conditions. Specifically, we propose that the wage...

Why Are Married Men Working So Much? Home Production, Household Bargaining and Per-Capita Hours Empirical patterns of labor supply at the micro level tend to reject the unitary model assumption implicit in most macro theories, where households are the deemed to be rational agents. This paper examines the rise in per-capita labor since 1975 and asks how the inclusion of bargaining between spouse...

We present clean evidence of a direct social context effect on behavior in a laboratory experiment: the gender composition of the room significantly alters the risk decisions of subjects even when the actions or presence of others are neither payoff nor information relevant. Our design is such that subjects do not know the decisions of others, nor can they be inferred. We find that women become...

This paper assesses the impact of 30 years of globalization on gender equity in well-being in Latin America and the Caribbean. Data indicate that while some gaps in well-being have narrowed, progress is uneven across a set of nine indicators, and in some cases, conditions have worsened. Despite the optimism of market proponents, growth is not found to be an equalizer for gender anymore than it ...

This paper examines the relationship between sexual harassment and the job satisfaction and intended turnover of active-duty women in the US military. Using single-equation probit models, we find that experiencing a sexually harassing behavior is associated with reduced job satisfaction and heightened intentions to leave the military. However, bivariate probit results indicate that failing to c...

Why Do Women Leave Science and Engineering? I use the 1993 and 2003 National Surveys of College Graduates to examine the higher exit rate of women compared to men from science and engineering relative to other fields. I find that the higher relative exit rate is driven by engineering rather than science, and show that 60% of the gap can be explained by the relatively greater exit rate from engi...

Female Breadwinner Families: Their Existence, Persistence and Sources We develop a typology for understanding couple households where the female is the major earner – what we term female breadwinner households – and test it using data from the first two waves of the HILDA Survey. We distinguish temporary from persistent female breadwinner households and hypothesise, and confirm, that these two ...

Cognitive Skills, Gender and Risk Preferences In this paper we utilise data from a unique new birth‐cohort study to see how the risk preferences of young people are affected by cognitive skills and gender. We find that cognitive ability (measured by the percentile ranking for university entrance at age 18) has no effect on risk preferences measured at age 20. This is in contrast to experimental...

This paper identifies matches on the male and female professional tennis tours in which one player faces a high payoff from being “on the bubble” of direct entry into one of the lucrative Grand Slam tournaments, while their opposition does not. Analyzing over 378,000 matches provides strong evidence for corrupt behavior on the men’s tour, as bubble players are substantially more likely to beat ...

This paper investigates the gender wage gap in Denmark, the Netherlands, France and Spain by boostrapping the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition. The boostrap method is used to compute confidence intervals and to perform hypothesis tests for the (disaggregated) explained and unexplained components of the national earnings differentials between men and women. From the subset of paid employees selected...