Journal of Population Economics最新文献

We examine how the gender of business owners is related to the wages paid to female relative to male employees working in their firms. Using Finnish register data and employing firm fixed effects, we find that the gender pay gap is—starting from a gender pay gap of 11 to 12%—two to three percentage points lower for hourly wages in female-owned firms than in male-owned firms. Results are robust to how the wage is measured, as well as to various further robustness checks. More importantly, we find substantial differences between industries. While, for instance, in the manufacturing sector, the gender of the owner plays no role in the gender pay gap, in several service sector industries, like ICT or business services, no or a negligible gender pay gap can be found, but only when firms are led by female business owners. Businesses with male ownership maintain a gender pay gap of around 10% also in the latter industries. With increasing firm size, the influence of the gender of the owner, however, fades. In large firms, it seems that others—firm managers—determine wages and no differences in the pay gap are observed between male- and female-owned firms.

Previous literature has established that lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people are at least as likely to be poor as heterosexual people, standing in contrast to myths of “gay affluence.” These findings have used datasets limited by either sample size or using partnership status to infer sexual orientation. Using U.S. data from the Household Pulse Survey, which allows us to identify large samples of individuals who self-identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, we find that bisexuals have lower incomes and are more likely to experience poverty, and bisexual individuals, gay men, and lesbian women are more likely to report financial hardship. Additionally, we find that LGB people utilize government assistance at higher rates than heterosexual people, even when allowing for selection into poverty status. We propose several explanations for these differentials, drawing on the program non-participation literature, and suggest that social network effects, lessened stigma, and increased reliance on public programs may explain these differences. Finally, we examine receipt of the enhanced child tax credit and find evidence that gay men and lesbian women with children were less likely to receive it than heterosexual men and women with children.

Post-marital residence norms govern where a married couple resides after marriage: with the husband’s family, the wife’s family, or independently. We study whether these arrangements affect female autonomy and domestic violence outcomes in four Southeast Asian countries—Indonesia, Philippines, Cambodia, and Myanmar—where a sizable proportion of the population practices each type of marital residence. Compared to independently residing families within the same province-country, married women residing with the husband’s family have worse autonomy outcomes, whereas those residing with members of their own natal families fare substantially better. This aligns well with an anthropological understanding of how gendered patterns of influence in a social system might potentially interact with female empowerment. On the other hand, we observe that married women in both types of non-independent households suffer from less frequent domestic abuse compared to women residing independently, likely due to a deterrence effect from the presence of other family members.

Much less is known about the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the provision of early childhood preschool services relative to research on school closures. We conducted surveys of more than 5000 early childhood service providers and leverage temporal and spatial variation in India’s intensity of lockdowns to quantify disruptions to preschool services under the world’s largest early childhood development program between areas with different strictness of lockdown measures. We document a 23 percentage point reduction in the provision of preschool services in red zone lockdown areas (strictest measures) relative to green zone lockdown areas (least strict measures). We find that pre-COVID measures of high worker locus of control and public service motivation offset the reduction in differential preschool service provision by 27–37%.

This paper presents an analysis of the effects of public old-age support on individuals’ fertility decisions and on the long-term equilibrium in an overlapping generation economy with strategic bequest motives. Parents must pay their adult children at least the reservation wage to receive informal old-age support from them (individual rationality constraint). Formal old-age support is financed through wage taxes on children. The increased present value of formal old-age support tends to increase old-age utility, thereby decreasing the family support demand and decreasing savings for the old age. The increased wage tax reduces the opportunity cost of child-rearing time, thereby increasing the fertility rate. The effects of increased formal old-age support on per-worker capital and labor are indeterminate, as is the effect on the long-term lifetime utility of individuals. A strategic bequest motive might engender a higher fertility rate than that of the social optimum.

This paper develops an overlapping generations model that links a public health system to a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension system. It relies on two assumptions. First, the health system directly finances curative health spending on the elderly. Second, public pensions partially depend on health status by introducing a component indexed to society’s average level of old-age disability. Reducing the average disability rate in the economy then lowers pension benefits as the need to finance long-term care services also drops. We study the effects of introducing such a ‘comprehensive’ Social Security system on individual decisions, capital accumulation, and welfare. We first show that health investments can boost savings and capital accumulation under certain conditions. Second, if individuals are sufficiently concerned with their health when old, it is optimal to introduce a health-dependent pension system, as this will raise social welfare compared to a system where pensions are not tied to the society’s average level of old-age disability. Our analysis thus highlights an important policy recommendation: making PAYG pension schemes partially health-dependent can be beneficial to society.

International migration increases classroom diversity around the world, but little is known about the effect of foreign-origin teachers on students’ academic achievement. This study investigates whether foreign-origin teachers causally affect their students’ academic performance. Exploiting within-student variation in assignment to teachers in Germany, I find that teachers who are immigrants or descendants of immigrants significantly increase the reading comprehension of their students in secondary school, but do not affect their math skills. This study is the first to investigate bilingualism as a potential mechanism and shows that the effect on reading comprehension is driven by bilingual foreign-origin teachers. Given their own experience in language learning, they seem exceptionally well-equipped to teach languages. This study contributes to the scant evidence on the causal relationship between teachers’ foreign origin and students’ academic achievement in light of a large and persistent achievement gap between native and foreign-origin students.

This study evaluates the labor supply behavior of US-born Hispanic youth in response to immigration enforcement. We draw on the added-worker effect and underscore immigration enforcement actions as a factor influencing labor supply decisions within immigrant families. We argue that while immigration enforcement reduces labor supply among non-citizens, the labor supply among US-born Hispanic youth in mixed-status families increases. Using the Current Population Survey and data on immigration-related arrests, we find that an unexpected surge in arrests increases labor force participation of US-born Hispanic youth by 6 percentage points and weekly hours worked by up to 20%.

This study examines the heterogeneous impacts of minimum wages, which could affect low-income workers’ earnings and employment opportunities, on crime rates across neighboring communities. Using geo-tagged reported crime incident data from 18 major U.S. cities, we find that minimum wage increases reduce violent crime rates notably more in low-income communities than in high-income ones. On average, a one-dollar real minimum wage increase narrows the disparity in quarterly violent crime rates between low- and high-income communities by 12%. The impact varies considerably across different types of cities. The income effect resulting from raising the minimum wage is the main contributing factor.

More than (18%) of US adults meet the diagnostic criteria for a mental illness. Yet, many who could benefit from mental health care do not receive any treatment, primarily due to inability to pay for care or lack of health insurance coverage. How does a change in health insurance coverage affect psychological well-being and mental health? We explore this question using age-based health insurance coverage policies in the United States as natural experiments. We provide evidence that losing health insurance coverage at the age 26 due to aging out from dependent coverage is associated with a statistically significant deterioration in certain mental health indicators and psychological well-being among young adults. On the other hand, we find no evidence of an improvement in mental health or psychological well-being among the elderly at the age 65 due to becoming eligible for Medicare. These results are robust to potential changes in risk-taking behavior and physical health at the same age cutoffs.