Labor Market For Men Research Articles

Revising the Racial Wage Gap Among Men in the United States: The Role of Nonemployment, Underemployment, and Incarceration

This article examines trends in racial earnings disparities to observe how the socially constructed concept of race impacts the U.S. labor market for men from 1981 to 2008. I develop a racial earnings gap measure that accounts for the labor market experience of the nonemployed using Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) Completed Gold Standard data produced by the U.S. Census Bureau. This data set includes administrative earnings data from the Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration merged with SIPP household survey data. Conventional measures that do not account for the nonemployed miss the impact of an increasing number of nonemployed, prime working-age men, particularly Black men, and the accelerating incarceration rate during the 1980s-1990s. An unadjusted estimate of the White earnings premium indicates a large racial earnings gap that fluctuates between about 140% and 150% over 1981-2008. This suggests that labor market conditions and policies may be limiting, but not reducing, racial earnings inequality. The adjusted White earnings premium averages 28 percentage points higher over the time period of this study. The premium also rises further, more quickly, and sustains this higher level longer. The adjusted measure suggests that labor market conditions and policies continue to produce growing levels of racial earnings inequality.

Male Fertility: Facts, Distribution and Drivers of Inequality

We document new facts on the distribution of male fertility and its relationship with men's labor market outcomes. Using Norwegian registry data on all births since 1967, we show that rates of male childlessness in recent cohorts are 71\% among the lowest five percent of earners but only 11\% among the highest earners, and that this gap widened by almost 20 percentage points over the last thirty cohort years. There has been a compression in the fertility distribution, with a substantial share of men being ``left behind'' and fewer men experiencing a larger share of the population's new births. We use firm bankruptcies as a source of variation in job loss and earnings to provide robust evidence that men experiencing negative labor market shocks are less likely to experience the birth of a child, transition out of childlessness, and be partnered, and that these effects are persistent up to 15 years after the event. We conclude by documenting that men's fertility penalty to job loss has increased markedly over the last three decades.

Male Fertility: Facts, Distribution and Drivers of Inequality

We document new facts on the distribution of male fertility and its relationship with men's labor market outcomes. Using Norwegian registry data on all births since 1967, we show that rates of male childlessness in recent cohorts are 72% among the lowest five percent of earners but only 11% among the highest earners, and that this gap widened by almost 20 percentage points over the last thirty cohort years. There has been a compression in the fertility distribution, with a substantial share of men being left behind and fewer men experiencing a larger share of the population's new births. We use firm bankruptcies as a source of variation in job loss and earnings to provide robust evidence that men experiencing negative labor market shocks are less likely to experience the birth of a child, transition out of childlessness, and be partnered, and that these effects are persistent up to 15 years after the event. We conclude by documenting that men's fertility penalty to job loss has increased markedly over the last three decades.

Sexual Orientation Discrimination in the Labor Market Against Gay Men

The study replicates the first European field experiment on gay men's labor market prospects in Greece. Utilizing the same protocol as the original study in 2006-2007, two follow-up field experiments took place in 2013-2014 and 2018-2019. The study estimated that gay men experienced occupational access constraints and wage sorting in vacancies offering lower remuneration. It was found that in 2013-2014 and 2018-2019, gay men experienced increasingly biased treatment compared to 2006-2007. Moreover, the results suggested that unemployment bore an association with occupational access constraints and wage sorting in vacancies offering lower remuneration for gay men. In each of the three experiments, this study captured recruiters' attitudes toward gay men. A one standard deviation increase in taste-discrimination attitudes against gay men decreased their access to occupations by 9.6%. Furthermore, a one standard deviation increase in statistical-discrimination attitudes against gay men decreased their access to occupations by 8.1%. According to the findings, in 2013-2014 and 2018-2019, firms excluding gay applicants expressed a higher level of taste- and statistical-discrimination attitudes compared to 2006-2007. A gay rights backlash due to the LGBTIQ+ group's attempt to advance its agenda, rising far-right rhetoric, and prejudice associated with economic downturns experienced in Greece might correspond with increasing biases against gay men.

The Rise of Programming and the Stalled Gender Revolution

Despite remarkable progress toward gender equality over the past half-century, the stalled convergence in the gender wage gap after the mid-1990s remains a puzzle. This study provides new insights into this puzzle by conducting the first large-scale investigation of the uneven impact of the rise of programming in the labor market for men and women since the mid-1990s. We argue that the increasing reliance on programming has favored men’s economic status relative to women’s and therefore may help explain the slow convergence of the gender wage gap. We differentiate between two effects: (1) the composition effect, wherein men experience a greater employment growth in programming-intensive occupations relative to women, and (2) the price effect, wherein the wage returns to programming intensity increase more for men than women. Our empirical analysis documents a strong relationship between the rise of programming and the slow convergence of the gender wage gap among college graduates. Counterfactual simulations indicate that the absence of the composition and price effects would have reduced the gender wage gap over the past two decades by an additional 14.70 percent. These findings call attention to the role gender institutions play in shaping the uneven labor market impact of technological change.

The Evidence on Early Retirement After the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid Expansion

This paper investigates the effect of the Affordable Care Act's (ACA) Medicaid expansion on the retirement decision of low-educated adults aged 55-64. Using data from the American Community Survey, I employ a difference-in-differences strategy that exploits the timing and expansion decisions of states for adults without dependent children (childless adults). I find that the expansions increase Medicaid enrollment for both men and women. The estimates also suggest that the expansions and Medicaid enrollment result in women retiring early, whereas there is no significant change in the retirement behavior of men. These findings imply that the effect of health insurance on women's retirement decisions may depend on men's labor market responses to health insurance.

Downward spiral: The impact of out-of-home placement on paternal welfare dependency

In this article, we test how out-of-home placement affects men's labor market attachment, and in so doing we provide a novel parallel to existing research on how fatherhood affects men, which focuses almost exclusively on a child's arrival. Using population panel data from Denmark that include all first time fathers whose children were placed in out-of-home care from 1995 to 2005, we find that having a child placed in care is associated with up to a 4 percentage point increase in welfare dependency. Having a child placed in out-of-home care appear to aggravate conditions that likely necessitated the out-of-home placement to begin with, thereby likely necessitating longer duration of out-of-home placements. Thus, out-of-home placements have substantial secondary costs for parents and society.

Participação no mercado de trabalho e no trabalho doméstico: homens e mulheres têm condições iguais?

A participação das mulheres no mercado de trabalho representa um dos pontos centrais da análise econômica sob a ótica feminista. Apesar do aumento da participação das mulheres no mercado de trabalho e da diminuição da diferença salarial média entre os dois gêneros, as mulheres ainda enfrentam uma grande dificuldade de serem remuneradas e promovidas em relação aos homens. Os modelos econômicos competitivos não conseguem explicar essas diferenças sem fazer uso de hipóteses fortes sobre as preferências individuais e os objetivos da família. Uma das possibilidades estudadas é que a diferença na remuneração das mulheres tem um aspecto social através de seu trabalho não somente para o mercado, mas também para a manutenção da ordem dentro da família. Este estudo tem como objetivo principal analisar as diferentes participações dos gêneros no trabalho doméstico como potencial influenciador das diferentes condições no mercado de trabalho. Nossos resultados apontam que as mulheres têm uma dupla e pesada jornada de trabalho. Entre nossas principais conclusões, podemos citar que a participação da mulher no mercado de trabalho, principalmente com o aumento de sua remuneração frente ao total da renda familiar, impacta positivamente sua condição de barganha na família, implicando uma menor participação no trabalho doméstico.

Women and the Phillips Curve: Do Women's and Men's Labor Market Outcomes Differentially Affect Real Wage Growth and Inflation?

During the economic expansion of the 1990s, the United States enjoyed both low inflation rates and low levels of unemployment. Juhn, Murphy, and Topel (2002) point out that the low unemployment rates for men in the 1990s were accompanied by historically high rates of suggesting that the 1990s economy was not as strong as the unemployment rate might indicate. We include women in the analysis and examine whether the Phillips curve relationships between real compensation growth, changes in inflation, and labor market slackness are the same for men and women and whether measures of non-employment better capture underlying economic activity, as suggested by Juhn, Murphy, and Topel's analysis. From 1965 to 2002 the increase in women's labor force participation more than offsets the decline for men, and low unemployment rates in the 1990s were accompanied by historically low overall rates. We find that women's measures of labor market slackness do as well as men's in explaining real compensation growth and changes in inflation after 1983. We also find some evidence that rates are more closely related to changes in inflation than other measures of labor market slackness; however, we do not find the same for real compensation growth.