Differences In Labor Market Outcomes Research Articles

Language diversity, gender inequality, and aggregate productivity in Canada

AbstractIdentifying sources of barriers to occupational mobility is central to evaluating the efficiency of the labor market. In this paper, we present an augmented Roy model in which workers self‐select into occupations, subject to labor market barriers that are specific to their socio‐linguistic group. Our findings provide evidence of differences in labor market outcomes across gender and linguistic groups in Canada. We argue that these differences could be attributed to barriers to labor mobility and that the reduction of these disparities would result in higher aggregate productivity in the country. In the augmented Roy model, the frictions result in inefficient allocation of labor across occupations. The study quantifies the change in aggregate productivity that would result from reducing the friction. The elimination of the frictions increased aggregate output on average by 6.2% and 4.4% in 1991 and 2011, respectively. This finding highlights the importance of reducing language barriers and gender inequality in the labor market. We provide policy recommendations for mitigating the disparities in socioeconomic outcomes between gender and linguistic groups.

Tournaments with safeguards: A blessing or a curse for women?

Workplace tournaments are one likely contributor to gender differences in labor market outcomes. We investigate a competitive workplace environment that may produce more gender-neutral outcomes: tournaments with safeguards. In our experiment, participants take part in a tournament with a real-effort task and choose whether they want to have a complementary safeguard that guarantees a higher wage for the low ranked. As expected, we find that women are more likely than men to choose such a safeguard. However, obtaining a safeguard comes at a cost. On average, the safeguard causes lower performance, reduces women's relative performance, and creates a gender wage gap. Thus, we provide novel evidence that easing women into tournaments can backfire.

Gender and job satisfaction in OECD countries

Gender differences in labour market outcomes are frequently reported. Earlier findings on associations of job satisfaction and gender reveal mixed results. Majority of empirical results indicate that women report higher levels of job satisfaction than men whereas others find no gender differences in job satisfaction. This study explores gender differences in job satisfaction by utilizing the Survey of Adult Skills for OECD countries. Employing the Balanced Worth Vector (BWV) procedure for data analysis, this study contributes to literature by presenting additional cross-national evidence from various regions of the world. Our findings reveal that there are heterogeneities in gender-gap paradox of job satisfaction across OECD countries.

Public vs. Private Education and the Labor Market Disparities in Nepal: Evidence From the Blinder-Oaxaca Decomposition

ABSTRACT: The debate between private and public education is a widely discussed issue in personal and policy forums globally. In Nepal, private schools have grown significantly due to the perceived advantages associated with them. This paper tests if there are significant differences in labor-market outcomes for individuals educated in private schools compared to those educated in public schools. Research Methodology and Data: We employ nationally representative household survey data from the Nepal Living Standards Survey (NLSS III), conducted by the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) Nepal in 2010/11, utilizing the Living Standards Measurement Survey (LMSS) methodology developed by the World Bank. We apply the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition method to examine the relationship between educational attainment and four distinct measures of labor-market outcomes: labor force participation, employment status, job security, and wage income. Initially, we estimate these outcomes separately for individuals in private education and those in public education. Subsequently, we calculate and analyze whether the disparities in estimated values can be attributed to differences in education. Our findings reveal significant labor-market disparities between individuals participating in private education and those in public education. Those with private education display lower rates of labor force participation and reduced employment rates, suggesting fewer working hours. However, those employed within this group enjoy more secure salaried positions. Furthermore, private education is linked to higher wage incomes, primarily attributable to longer educational periods. The Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition demonstrates that most of these disparities are associated with variations in educational backgrounds. Consequently, the results highlight the role of segregated education in contributing to labor-market inequality, emphasizing the impact of private schools in exacerbating economic disparities in Nepal. The findings underscore the significance of educational attainment in ameliorating disparities between individuals educated in public and private schools. To address these issues, policymakers should concentrate on strategies aimed at increasing the duration of education for public school students, such as providing free, quality higher education. By narrowing the educational gap between private and public institutions, the nation can work towards diminishing wage and job security disparities, fostering a more equitable society. These findings also have relevance for countries grappling with similar socio-economic challenges, initiating essential policy discussions.

Is Commercial Real Estate Gendered?

Gender differences in labor market outcomes are well-documented and are expected to be more pronounced in male-typed domains such as commercial real estate. In this study, we expand the literature examining gender dynamics in the labor market, focusing specifically on gendered parity in commercial real estate brokerage. Employing robust procedures, we find that the unadjusted observed male agent property sales price premium and shorter marketing time are completely absorbed by property and market attributes as male agents list/sell properties with superior property characteristics, specifically larger and higher quality properties, when compared to female agents. The findings suggest that initial gendered differences in sales price and TOM are due to industry-driven agent selection, in which women do not fully participate in the largest and best part of the office market. Despite these findings showing gender performance neutrality, female agents are involved in significantly fewer property transactions than their male counterparts. We find evidence that this unequal labor outcome is associated with a type of affinity bias known as 'homophilic’ behavior, in which buyers and sellers prefer to work with agents of their same gender, resulting in more male agent representation.

Hours, Occupations, and Gender Differences in Labor Market Outcomes

Goldin (2014) offers a narrative in which gender differences in home production responsibilities create gender gaps in labor market outcomes. We carry out a model-based quantitative assessment of this narrative and find that it can account for a significant share of gender gaps in occupational choice, wages, and hours. Our analysis emphasizes the quantitative significance of two key elements not highlighted by Goldin: heterogeneity in comparative advantage and multimember households. Gender differences in nonmarket responsibilities have important aggregate effects on welfare and productivity, similar to those emphasized by Hsieh et al. (2019). (JEL J16, J22, J24, J31, J71)

Tournaments with Safeguards a Blessing or a Curse for Women?

Workplace tournaments are one likely contributor to gender differences in labor market outcomes. Relative to men, women are often less eager to compete and thrive less under competitive pressure. We investigate a competitive workplace environment that may produce more gender-neutral outcomes: tournaments with safeguards. In our experiments, participants take part in a tournament with a real effort task and choose whether they want to have a complimentary safeguard that guarantees higher wages for the low-ranked. As expected, we find that women are more likely than men to obtain such a safeguard. However, obtaining a safeguard comes at a cost. On average, the safeguard causes lower performance, creates a gender wage gap, and over-proportionally disadvantages women. Thus, we provide novel evidence that easing women into tournaments can backfire.

Average Gaps and Oaxaca's Blinder Decompositions: A Cautionary Tale About Regression Estimates of Racial Differences in Labor Market Outcomes

Average Gaps and Oaxaca's Blinder Decompositions: A Cautionary Tale About Regression Estimates of Racial Differences in Labor Market Outcomes

Equilibrium Unemployment: The Role of Discrimination

U.S. labor markets are increasingly diverse and persistently unequal between genders, races and ethnicities, skill levels, and age groups. We use a structural model to decompose the observed differences in labor market outcomes across demographic groups in terms of underlying wedges in fundamentals. Of particular interest is the potential role of discrimination, either taste-based or statistical. Our model is a version of the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides model extended to include a life cycle, learning by doing, a nonparticipation state, and informational frictions. The model exhibits group-specific wedges in initial human capital, returns to experience, matching efficiencies, and job separation rates. We use the model to reverse engineer group-specific wedges that we then feed back into the model to assess the fraction of various disparities they account for. Applying this methodology to 1998–2018 U.S. data, we show that differences in initial human capital, returns to experience, and job separation rates account for most of the demographic disparities; wedges in matching efficiencies play a secondary role. Our results suggest a minor aggregate impact of taste-based discrimination in hiring and an important role for statistical discrimination affecting particularly female groups and Black males. Our approach is macro, structural, unified, and comprehensive.

College Majors, Occupations, and the Gender Wage Gap

The paper assesses gender differences in pre-labor market specialization among the college-educated and highlights how those differences have evolved over time. Women choose majors with lower potential earnings (based on male wages associated with those majors) and subsequently sort into occupations with lower potential earnings given their major choice. These differences have narrowed over time, but recent cohorts of women still choose majors and occupations with lower potential earnings. Differences in undergraduate major choice explain a substantive portion of gender wage gaps for the college-educated above and beyond simply controlling for occupation. Collectively, our results highlight the importance of understanding gender differences in the mapping between college major and occupational sorting when studying the evolution of gender differences in labor market outcomes over time.

Self‐employment preferences among university graduates in Ghana: Does gender make a difference?

SummaryMotivationYouth employment has become an urgent policy issue in Africa. Half of the population is under 25 years old on a continent in which job creation lags behind economic growth. Consequently, policy‐makers have increasingly proposed self‐employment as a solution to the challenge of youth unemployment.PurposeThis study examines self‐employment preferences among university graduates in Ghana. We address two related questions: (1) Are there gender differences in young people’s willingness to pursue self‐employment; and (2) what are the predictors of preference for self‐employment in male and female graduates?Methods and approachOur analysis draws on a sample of 1,180 university graduates interviewed during their compulsory year of national service, which follows graduation. We analyse gender and other sub‐group differences using t‐tests for statistical significance of differences in means. We then estimate multinomial logit regressions to analyse what factors predict employment preferences.FindingsWe find substantial gender differences in preferences for self‐employment. Despite women having higher rates of self‐employment in the economy, the female graduates in our sample are significantly less likely to prefer self‐employment than men—12% of women and 16% of men report that their desired type of work would be self‐employment. Moreover, while marital status and childbearing are the strongest predictors of self‐employment preferences for women, self‐employment experience and financial background are the strongest predictors for men.Policy implicationsThis study suggests that gender differences in labour market outcomes are partly a function of differential preferences rooted in unequal constraints. Bridging these gendered inequalities will require policy interventions that both impact the preferences women form prior to entering the labour market and address their gender‐specific concerns about family responsibilities.

Racial Gaps in the Labor Market: The Role of Nonwhite Entrepreneurship

We investigate how the racial composition of entrepreneurs affects racial differences in labor market outcomes of workers. We create a novel data set that identifies the race of firm owners in Brazil and link it with matched employer-employee data that contains information on the universe of formal employment contracts. We first present evidence of assortative matching between nonwhite workers and nonwhite entrepreneurs. Controlling for a wide set of covariates, we find that the share of nonwhite workers is 18.7% higher in firms with at least one nonwhite owner. We then show that the adjusted racial wage gap is 28% smaller in firms with nonwhite entrepreneurs than in white-owned firms. This is partially explained by nonwhite workers accessing better occupations in firms with nonwhite entrepreneurs. Lastly, we show that nonwhite workers are 15% more likely to become entrepreneurs if they were previously employed by nonwhite entrepreneurs than if they were employed by white entrepreneurs.

Gender differences in competitiveness

Differences in labor market outcomes for women and men are highly persistent. Apart from discrimination, one frequently mentioned explanation could be differences in the attitude towards competition for both genders. Abundant empirical evidence indicates that multiple influences shape attitudes towards competition during different periods of the life cycle. Gender differences in competitiveness will not only influence outcomes during working age, but also during early childhood education. In order to reduce the gender gap in educational and labor market outcomes, it is crucial to understand when and why gender gaps in competitiveness arise and to study their consequences. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Understanding the Gender Earnings Gap: Hours Worked, Occupational Sorting, and Labor Market Experience

This article documents life-cycle gender differences in labor market outcomes using longitudinal data of a cohort of individuals from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. As in other datasets, the gender earnings gap increases with age.

Culture and gender allocation of tasks: source country characteristics and the division of non-market work among US immigrants

There is a well-known gender difference in time allocation within the household, which has important implications for gender differences in labor market outcomes. We ask how malleable this gender difference in time allocation is to culture. In particular, we ask if US immigrants allocate tasks differently depending upon the characteristics of the source countries from which they emigrated. Using data from the 2003–2017 waves of the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), we find that first-generation immigrants, both women and men, from source countries with more gender equality (as measured by the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index) allocate tasks more equally, while those from less gender equal source countries allocate tasks more traditionally. These results are robust to controls for immigration cohort, years since migration, and other own and spouse characteristics. There is also some indication of an effect of parent source country gender equality for second-generation immigrants, particularly for second-generation men with children. Our findings suggest that broader cultural factors do influence the gender division of labor in the household.

For Love and Money? Earnings and Marriage Among Same-Sex Couples

We investigate the earnings effects of marriage among same-sex couples in the United States. Gays and lesbians in the United States have only recently been allowed to enter into legally recognized marriages. As such, we know little about the impact of same-sex marriage on the economic lives of gays and lesbians. We use data from the 2013 to 2017 American Community Survey to show that married gay men experience a 3% marriage earnings premium and lesbian women experience a 6% marriage earnings premium relative to their unmarried cohabiting counterparts. The marriage premium for gay men is smaller than that of heterosexual married men, but the lesbian marriage premium is similar in size to the premium for heterosexual women. In both cases, we show that the marriage premium is larger relative to single gay men and lesbian women in the 2013 to 2017 National Health Interview Surveys. We also find that the marriage premium is more than two times larger among individuals who earn more than their partners, and marriage increases intrahousehold differences in labor market outcomes. This pattern is consistent with a common explanation of the earnings premium experienced by heterosexual men and women: marriage increases investments in relationships that affect patterns of household specialization. Therefore, our results suggest that the effect of marriage on how households organize their time is general and not unique to different-sex households.

International student mobility and the transition from higher education to work in Norway

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether international student mobility (ISM) has an impact on the transition from higher education to work. Two measures of labour market outcomes are investigated: unemployment and skills mismatch. To go beyond existing research, we analyse whether the effect of ISM on these outcomes vary by fields of study, intake grades, sociodemographic variables and more. Our analyses are based on data from the Norwegian graduate surveys time series from 2007 to 2017. After controlling for several confounding factors, we find very small differences in labour market outcomes between graduates with and without ISM experience. In comparison with field of study, immigrant background, previous labour market experience and business cycles, the effect of ISM on the examined labour market outcomes is small. Investigating whether graduates with different backgrounds benefit differently from ISM, we find evidence of moderate effect heterogeneities: Graduates with high intake grades and graduates in business and administration seem to benefit somewhat more. Regarding social origin and immigrant background, no heterogeneous effects are found. Contrary to findings from previous studies, we do not find that those least likely to study abroad benefit the most from it. Rather, there is a tendency that groups with the greatest likelihood of studying abroad are those who benefit most.

Educational mismatches for second generation migrants. An analysis of applied science graduates in the Netherlands

ABSTRACT Studies on overeducation and unemployment show that migrants are worse off in the labour market. In this study we focus on university of applied science graduates and compare second generation migrants and Dutch natives in order to look at a homogenous group. We furthermore extent the definition of educational mismatches by including horizontal mismatches. We find that migrants, and in particular non-western migrants, experience ethnic penalties in employment. Non-western migrants are more likely to experience a double mismatch, i.e. a horizontal as well as a vertical mismatch. Furthermore, western migrants are more likely to experience horizontal mismatches than natives. Analyses on whether ethnic penalties persist across the non-western minority show that Antillean migrants have relatively good labour market outcomes whereas Moroccan migrants are the worst off. Furthermore, we find a gender dimension in the educational mismatches for western migrants. While western male migrants only show slight differences in labour market outcomes, western female migrants are less likely to be correctly matched and more likely to be unemployed than their native counterparts. Comparing educational mismatches before and during the recent economic crisis shows that in times of economic downturns, the labour market position of non-western migrants is disproportionally negatively affected.

I (Don’t) Like You! But Who Cares? Gender Differences in Same-Sex and Mixed-Sex Teams

Abstract We study the effect of likeability on women’s and men’s team behaviour in a lab experiment. Extending a two-player public goods game and a minimum effort game by an additional pre-play stage that informs team members about their mutual likeability, we find that female teams lower their contribution to the public good in the event of low likeability, while male teams achieve high levels of co-operation irrespective of the level of mutual likeability. In mixed-sex teams, both women’s and men’s contributions depend on mutual likeability. Similar results are found in the minimum effort game. Our results offer a new perspective on gender differences in labour market outcomes: mutual dislikeability impedes team behaviour, except in all-male teams.

Professional identity and the gender gap in risk-taking. Evidence from field experiments with scientists

The gender gap in risk-taking is often used to explain differences in labor market outcomes. Yet, a number of studies suggest that this gap is larger in private contexts and is reduced in professional contexts. In two online field experiments with more than 1500 scientists we shed light on the causal role of the professional context by varying the salience of the professional or private identity. The main study finds that the gender gap in risk-taking is moderated—and vanishes for older scientists—when the professional identity is salient. The second study—designed to further explore mechanisms relating to non-professional identity—yields inconclusive results. While the results of the main study imply that gender gaps may be driven by the ability to switch between identities and adapt to prevailing norms, our second study suggest the need for further research to examine how prevailing norms are shaped and identity affects gender gaps.