Having a female firstborn child significantly increases the probability that a woman’s first marriage breaks up. Recent work has exploited this exogenous variation to measure the effect of marital breakup on economic outcomes, and has concluded that divorce has little effect on women’s average household income. Employing an Abadie (2003) technique that allows us to look at the impact of marital...

This study analyzes the relationship between the segregation of women across establishments and the salaries paid to men and women. My aim is to separate the impact the proportion of women working within an establishment has upon individual wages. For this purpose hypotheses are formulated as to what drives this impact: sex-specific preferences, lower qualifications among women or discriminatio...

Motivation, Expectations and the Gender Pay Gap for UK Graduates Focussing on recent UK graduates, a wage gap of 12% is found. The unexplained component of the gap is small and a large fraction of the gap can be explained by subject choice, job characteristics, motivation and expectation variables. Motivation and expectations account for 44% of the explained gap, thus most studies over-estimate...

This paper explains the narrowing of gender gaps in wages and market hours in recent decades by the growth of the service economy. We propose a model with three sectors: goods, services and home production. Women have a comparative advantage in the production of services in the market and at home. The growth of the services sector, in turn driven by structural transformation and marketization o...

Do Non-Cognitive Skills Help Explain the Occupational Segregation of Young People? This paper investigates the role of non-cognitive skills in the occupational segregation of young workers entering the U.S. labor market. We find entry into male-dominated fields of study and male-dominated occupations are both related to the extent to which individuals believe they are intelligent and have “male...

The Lasting Impact of Mothers’ Fetal Malnutrition on Their Offspring: Evidence from the China Great Leap Forward Famine We find that second-generation effects of in utero and early childhood malnutrition on the school participation of the offspring of mothers who experienced the China Great Leap Forward Famine. The direct impact on entrance to senior high school is also negative, but smaller in...

Using the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), this paper investigates the determinants of training participation in Germany, distinguishing between self-initiated and employerinitiated training. Self-initiated training is considered as being a decision within households rather than purely individual. Therefore, in addition to standard training determinants, information on one’s own and partner’s time ...

Wage Differentials in the 1990s in Israel: Endowments, Discrimination, and Selectivity The purpose of this paper is to investigate wage structures of professional workers in the Israeli labor market, using data from the most recent 1995 Census and correcting for selectivity at the stage of entrance into the occupation. The sample of professionals is decomposed into several subsamples: men and w...

Gender, Ethnic Identity and Work The European Union’s strategy to raise employment is confronted with very low work participation among many minority ethnic groups, in particular among immigrants. This study examines the potential of immigrants’ identification with the home and host country ethnicity to explain that deficit. It introduces a two-dimensional understanding of ethnic identity, as a...

In contrast to most dowry oriented societies where payments have declined with modernisation, those in India have undergone signi ̄cant in°ation over the last ̄ve decades. This paper explains the di®erence between these two experiences by focusing on the role played by caste. The theoretical model contrasts caste and non-caste based societies: in the former, there exists an inherited component t...