Family Investments in Human Capital: Earnings of Women

Mincer, Jacob; Polachek, Solomon W.

doi:10.1086/260293

Cited by 1,578 publications

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“…Leave policies could lead to wage gains for females if they encourage more work. (See for instance Mincer andPolachek, 1974 andErosa, et al, 2005.) In our model, generous mandatory policies reduce the working-to-population ratios of mothers with young children.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 97%

A general equilibrium analysis of parental leave policies

Erosa

Fuster

Restuccia

2010

Review of Economic Dynamics

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An important feature of the U.S. labor market is that, even after controlling for measurable differences in education and experience, the average wage of women with children is 89 percent of the average wage of women without children. This "family gap" in wages accounts for almost half the gender gap in wages. Proponents of mandatory-leave policies argue that career interruptions associated with fertility have long-lasting effects on female employment and are costly in terms of human-capital losses for females. Despite the fact that mandatory leaves are widely applied in developed countries, their effects on the economy are not well understood. We develop and calibrate a general-equilibrium model of fertility and labor-market decisions to study the quantitative impact of such policies. We build on the Mortensen and Pissarides (1994) labor-market framework by introducing male and female workers, general and specific human-capital accumulation on the job, and temporary separations between the worker and a job. We find that: (i) the loss of specific human capital accounts for a small fraction of the wage gaps and (ii) mandatory-leave policies have substantial aggregate and redistributive effects on fertility, employment, and welfare. Interestingly, we find that the general-equilibrium effect of mandatory-leave policies is a reduction in the amount of time females spend at home with children.Keywords: Parental leaves, fertility, specific human capital, temporary separations. JEL Classification: J2,J3. † We are grateful to Ig Horstmann for comments and suggestions. We also thank seminar participants at several universities and conferences. All remaining errors are our own. We acknowledge the financial support of the BBVA foundation.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 97%

A general equilibrium analysis of parental leave policies

Erosa

Fuster

Restuccia

2010

Review of Economic Dynamics

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“…In this paper, we shed light on several possible sources of slowing convergence in the 1990s using data from the Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), the only nationally representative data base that contains information on workers' actual labor market experience. Labor market experience has been shown to be an extremely important factor in explaining the gender pay gap (Mincer and Polachek 1974) and its trends (e.g., Blau and Kahn 1997;O'Neill and Polachek 1993). We focus on a number of hypotheses that might help to explain the slower progress of women in the 1990s.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The U.S. Gender Pay Gap in the 1990S: Slowing Convergence

Blau¹,

Kahn²

2006

ILR Review

477

275

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit company supported by Deutsche Post World Net. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its research networks, research support, and visitors and doctoral programs. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. Using Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data, we study the slowdown in the convergence of female and male wages in the 1990s compared to the 1980s. We find that changes in human capital did not contribute to the slowdown, since women's relative human capital improved comparably in the two decades. Occupational upgrading and deunionization had a larger positive effect on women's relative wages in the 1980s, explaining a portion of the slower 1990s convergence. However, the largest factor was that the "unexplained" gender wage gap fell much faster in the 1980s than the 1990s. Our evidence suggests that changes in labor force selectivity, changes in gender differences in unmeasured characteristics and in labor market discrimination, as well as changes in the favorableness of demand shifts each may have contributed to the slowing convergence of the unexplained gender pay gap.JEL Classification: J16, J31

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“…To control for a woman's responsibility for children, we include controls for the number of children, with dummy variables for one child, two children, or three or more children. There are many reasons why children might affect women's wages (see Mincer and Polachek, 1974;Becker, 1985;Hakim, 1996). Children may affect women's wages directly, by for instance lowering a woman's effort on the job, or indirectly, by for instance lowering the amount of work experience and job tenure a woman accumulates over time.…”

Section: The Effects Of Children On Women's Wagesmentioning

confidence: 99%