Part-Week Work and Human Capital Investment by Married Women

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of Wisconsin Press andThe Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Human Resources. ABSTRACTThis paper uses National Longitudinal Surveys data to examine the relationship between part-week work and the wages and postschool human capital investment of married women. The empirical evidence presented is consistent with the hypothesis that part-week workers and their employers will have relatively lower incentive to invest in on-the-job training since partweek work means fewer hours in the labor market than full-week employment. The effect of part-week work by women on the male-female wage differential is ambiguous because the labor force participation of married women is discontinuous over the life cycle. Differences between men and women in their employment experience over the life cycle have frequently been suggested as contributing to differences in earnings by sex. Recently, Jacob Mincer and Solomon Polachek [7]attributed a significant portion of the male-female wage differential to sex differences in human capital investment and labor force participation. Their work strongly emphasized the greater intermittency and shorter duration of the work experience of women relative to men. Another difference between male and female work patterns, perhaps just as striking, is the greater extent of part-week work among women. Today about one-1 The Bureau of Labor Statistics defines part-week work as work of less than 35 hours per week. Part-week work may be of two types: (a) the job is regularly scheduled for work hours of less than 35 hours per week, and (b) because of transitory events, the workweek is

The Part‐Time Pay Penalty for Women in Britain

“…The earliest studies were for the US (e.g. Jones and Long, 1979;Blank, 1990) but there are also some studies for the UK. The first was probably Ermisch and Wright (1993) who used data from the 1980 Women and Employment Survey.…”

The part-time pay penalty in a segmented labor market

“…While the earliest studies focused on the US (Jones and Long, 1979;Blank, 1990) and the UK (Ermisch and Wright, 1993), the more recent literature has evaluated the PT pay penalty in many industrialized countries, such as Australia (Rodgers, 2004), Belgium (Jepsen, 2001;and Jepsen et al, 2005), Norway (Hardoy and Schøne, 2004), The Netherlands (Hu and Tijdens, 2003); and West Germany (Wolf, 2002), among others. Most studies find a negative unadjusted PT wage gap (a PT pay penalty), the magnitude of which differs substantially across the different countries.…”

“…Thus, there has been a deepening segmentation of these labor markets with 'insiders' (those with permanent contracts), on the one side, enjoying high level of employment protection, decent jobs and generous benefits, and 'outsiders' (those with fixed-term contracts), on the other, having poor labor market perspectives and low 1 See Jones and Long, 1979;Blank, 1990;Ermisch and Wright, 1993;Montgomery and Cosgrove, 1995;Jepsen, 2001;Wolf, 2002;Hu and Tijdens, 2003;Rodgers, 2004;Jepsen et al, 2005;Hardoy and Schøne, 2006;Manning and Petrongolo, 2008;and Connolly and Gregory, 2009, among others. 2 A possible explanation for this is that most studies (especially in Europe) rely on relatively small sample sizes of individuals who work PT making difficult the heterogeneity analysis.…”

Women's Part-Time/Full-Time Wage Di fferentials in Europe: An Endogenous Switching Model

“…Most of them prove that part-timers deal with a lower hourly wage compared to full-timers, calling into question the assumption of a constant gross wage to hour worked (Jones and Long, 1979;Ermisch and Wright, 1993;Manning and Petrongolo, 2008;Rodgers, 2004). An odd exception is the result of the analysis performed by Booth and Wood (2006) on Australian workers.…”