Academic literature on the topic 'Parental labor supply'

AbstractAs a policy tool aimed at raising parental labor supply, childcare subsidies come with high expectations. Using data from a factorial survey conducted in the City of Bern, Switzerland, we examine whether childcare subsidies reach their goal. Because of the simultaneity of the decision to take up a job and arranging childcare, we experimentally alter hypothetical income (e.g., gross earnings from a job, income from other sources) as well as aspects of the childcare setting including subsidy levels. Using an alternative-specific conditional logit model, we show that subsidies have the expected effect of increasing parents’ labor supply. Moreover, the results from simulations based on the estimated utility function show that varying subsidy levels have different effects on subgroups of parents. Subsidies are especially efficient in raising the labor supply of low-status parents, and especially for women. We also find that subsidies already have the desired effect at 25% of total childcare costs and that the marginal utility of higher subsidy levels decreases beyond that threshold. Subsidies covering 25% of the total costs for childcare lead to an approximately 2 h per week increase in the labor supply of women.

In 1990, the US had the sixth highest female labor participation rate among 22 OECD countries. By 2010 its rank had fallen to seventeenth. We find that the expansion of “family-friendly” policies, including parental leave and part-time work entitlements in other OECD countries, explains 29 percent of the decrease in US women's labor force participation relative to these other countries. However, these policies also appear to encourage part-time work and employment in lower level positions: US women are more likely than women in other countries to have full time jobs and to work as managers or professionals.

AbstractIn this paper, we present a model of a one-parent, one-child household where parental decisions on labor supply, leisure, and the demand for parental and public child care are simultaneously endogenized and intertemporally determined. We characterize the path of the optimal decisions and investigate the effects of various public child care fees and of the quality of public child care services on the parent’s time allocation and the child’s performance level. Our results show that different public child care policies may induce substantially diverging effects and reveal that each policy frequently faces a trade off between an encouragement of labor supply and an enhancement of the child’s performance. In addition, we find that, from an efficiency perspective, an income-based fee levied on public child care services is dominated by both a flat fee and a use-based fee system.

The spread of Covid-19 led to social restrictions of various kinds, of which closing schools was one. This paper studies the effect of school closures on parental labor supply. To this end, I use repeated cross-sectional data on households at the monthly level from the US Current Population Survey (CPS), and employ a difference-in-differences methodology where I compare the labor market outcomes for parents to school-aged children that require supervision with parents to slightly older children, before and after March 2020. The results show that there is a significant reduction in the labor supply of parents to younger children as a result of school closures, and that the effects are larger for mothers than for fathers.

Cette thèse se compose de trois chapitres indépendants sur les enfants de migrants restés au village en Chine, ainsi que sur les personnes âgées vivant seules en Thaïlande et au Vietnam. Le premier chapitre traite de la manière dont les frais de scolarité dans les zones urbaines affectent la migration des enfants en Chine. Nos résultats suggèrent que des frais plus élevés empêchent les travailleurs migrants d’amener leurs enfants avec eux dans les zones urbaines. Nous trouvons également que les travailleurs migrants dans la situation la plus précaire sont les plus touchés par une augmentation des frais de scolarité. Le deuxième chapitre étudie les répercussions de la migration interne des enfants adultes et de leurs envois de fonds sur l'offre de main-d'œuvre de leurs parents restés en zone rurale au Vietnam. Les résultats montrent que les mères ont tendance à travailler plus si elles ont des enfants migrants, mais à travailler moins lorsqu'elles reçoivent des fonds de leur part. À l'inverse, les pères sont moins touchés par la migration de leurs enfants et par leurs envois de fonds. Le troisième article examine l’impact de la retraite universelle introduite en Thaïlande en 2009 sur le bien-être et l'offre de main-d'œuvre de ses bénéficiaires et de leurs conjoints. Les résultats empiriques montrent que ce régime de retraite ne génère pas d'impact significatif sur la pauvreté ou les dépenses des ménages, mais recevoir une retraite a un impact négatif important sur la participation des bénéficiaires au marché du travail. De plus, les hommes comme les femmes réagissent à la perception d’une retraite par leur conjoint en quittant leur emploi et en restant inactifs
This dissertation consists of three independent papers on the left-behind children in China and the left-behind elderly in Thailand and Vietnam. The first paper addresses how school fees in urban areas affect child migration in China. Our findings suggest that higher fees deter migrant workers from bringing their children to urban areas, and more vulnerable migrant workers are most affected by an increase in school fees. The second paper investigates the impacts of adult children’s internal migration and remittances on the labor supply responses of the rural left-behind parents in Vietnam. The results show that mothers tend to work more if they have migrant children, and they tend to work less when they receive remittances from their migrant children. Conversely, fathers tend to be less affected by child migration and their remittances. The third paper examines the impacts of the universal social pension introduced in Thailand in 2009 on the well-being and the labor supply responses of the recipients and their spouses. The empirical results show that the social pension scheme does not generate significant impacts on household poverty status or expenditures, but receiving social pensions has a significant negative impact on beneficiaries' own labor market participation. Further, both men and women are found to respond to their spouses' pensions by leaving their jobs and staying inactive

Cette thèse étudie l’impact des normes de genre et des institutions sur les choix éducatifs, les décisions d’offre de travail et les préférences politiques. Dans le premier chapitre, nous nous intéressons à l’influence du genre des enfants sur les opinions de leurs pères en matière de droits des femmes. Nous montrons que la présence d’au moins une fille parmi les enfants est associée à des attitudes plus marquées contre l’avortement pour les pères de droite et inversement, plus favorables à l’avortement pour les pères de gauche. Nous développons un modèle théorique dans lequel les pères, qui ont des préférences paternalistes, ont tendance à adopter des positions politiques plus extrêmes lorsqu’ils ont une fille plutôt qu’un garçon. La partie empirique de l’analyse repose sur l’utilisation de deux nouvelles sources de données : une base biographique des députés français, et une enquête post-électorale au niveau européen. Nos résultats suggèrent que les filles polarisent les attitudes de leur père en matière de droit à l’avortement. Ces résultats réconcilient en partie les conclusions contradictoires des travaux récents sur l’influence des filles sur les opinions politiques de leurs pères. Le deuxième chapitre est issu d’un travail commun avec E. Duchini. Nous étudions les décisions d’offre de travail des femmes dans un contexte institutionnel qui limitait jusqu’à récemment leur capacité à bénéficier d’un emploi du temps régulier. Historiquement en France, les enfants en âge d’aller à l’école maternelle et primaire n’avaient pas classe le mercredi. Nous utilisons la réforme dites des rythmes scolaires comme « expérience naturelle ». Avant 2013, les femmes dont le plus jeune enfant était en âge d’aller à l’école élémentaire étaient deux fois plus nombreuses que les hommes à ne pas travailler le mercredi. Afin de mesurer la réaction de l’offre de travail des mères à la réforme, nous utilisons la variation de son application dans le temps et en fonction de l’âge du plus jeune enfant. Nos résultats montrent que la réforme a permis à un plus grand nombre de femmes de travailler le mercredi, entraînant, en moins de deux ans, une réduction d’un tiers de leur différentiel de participation ce jour de la semaine par rapport aux femmes du groupe de contrôle. Cet effet est essentiellement attribuable aux mères pour qui une présence régulière au travail est particulièrement profitable, comme celles qui travaillent à des postes d’encadrement. Le troisième chapitre présente les résultats d’une expérimentation avec assignation aléatoire conduite de septembre 2015 à février 2016 avec T. Breda, J. Grenet et M. Monnet. Cette expérimentation montre que l’intervention courte d’un modèle positif d’identification féminin (role model) peut influencer les attitudes des apprenants, et contribuer ensuite à modifier leur choix d’orientation. Dans un premier temps, nous présentons des éléments descriptifs sur les attitudes différenciées des filles et des garçons vis-à-vis des sciences, et sur l’importance des stéréotypes vis-à-vis des femmes dans les sciences chez les lycéens. A l’aide d’une assignation aléatoire des élèves dans un groupe traité et dans un groupe contrôle, nous étudions l’impact causal des modèles positifs d’identification sur les aspirations, les attitudes et les choix éducatifs. Ces modèles féminins extérieurs font baisser de manière significative la prévalence des visions stéréotypées associées aux métiers dans les sciences, tant chez les élèves filles que garçons. Le traitement n’a pas d’effet significatif sur le choix d’orientation des élèves de seconde, mais la proportion de filles qui s’orientent et sont admises en classe préparatoire scientifique après le lycée augmente de 3 points de pourcentage. Cet effet correspond à une augmentation de 30% par rapport à la moyenne du groupe de contrôle. Ces changements sont principalement attribuables aux élèves ayant les meilleurs résultats scolaires en mathématiques
This dissertation examines the role of gender norms and institutions on human capital formation, labor supply, and political preferences. In the first chapter, I use both theoretical and empirical analysis to study the impact of offspring’s gender on their parental political beliefs toward gender issues. I examine the hypothesis that men’s political attitudes toward abortion do respond to the presence of a daughter, but differently according to their general political beliefs. This polarization effect of daughters means that the presence of a daughter is associated with more anti-abortion (respectively pro-abortion) views for right-wing (respectively left-wing) fathers. This argument is investigated in a simple economic model and its implications are studied empirically using two original datasets. The model predicts that fathers with paternalistic preferences adopt more extreme political positions when they have a daughter than when they have a son. The empirical investigation provides evidence of a polarization effect of daughters on fathers’ views on abortion. The magnitude of the effect corresponds to around 30% of the impact of right-wing political affiliation on abortion support. In the second chapter, together with E. Duchini, we investigate women’s employment decisions when institutions limit their chances of having a regular working schedule. We use a recent reform as a natural experiment to show that women do value flexibility when their children demand it. Before 2013, women whose youngest child was of primary school age were twice as likely as men not to work on Wednesdays. To measure mothers’ response, we exploit variations in the implementation of this policy over time and across the age of the youngest child. Our results show that, although mothers take advantage of the reform to close 1/3 of their initial gap in the probability of working on Wednesday with respect to the control group. This response seems to be driven by mothers who are more rewarded for a regular presence at work, such as those working in managerial positions. The third chapter reports the results of a large-scale randomized experiment showing that a light-touch, in-class intervention of external female role models, can influence students’ attitudes and contribute to a significant change in their choice of field of study. While the impact of peers and "horizontal exposure" on aspirations gained greater attention in the recent literature, surprisingly little is known about the impact of exposure to role models on students’ attitudes and schooling decisions. Together with T. Breda, J. Grenet and M. Monnet, we implemented and monitored a large-scale experiment in randomly selected high-school classes in France from September 2015 to February 2016. We first document gender differences in attitudes toward science, as well as the prevalence of stereotypical opinions with respect to women in science among high school students. Using random assignment of students to a one-hour intervention, we investigate the causal impact of role models on aspirations, attitudes, and educational investment. External female role models significantly reduce the prevalence of stereotypes associated to jobs in science, both for female and male students. Using exhaustive administrative data, we do not find significant effect of the treatment on the choices of year 10-students, but we show that the proportion of female students enrolled in selective science programs after high school graduation increases by 3 percentage points, which corresponds to a 30 percent-increase with respect to the baseline mean. These effects are essentially driven by high-achieving students

My dissertation consists of three essays on the Korean labor market. The first essay studies how the extensive provision of maternity leave and childcare leave in Korea affects the employment and wages of young women. This reform is expected to increase the labor supply and decrease the labor demand for young women. As a result, the mean wage of young women should fall. But the direction of the change in their employment probability is hard to infer because it depends on the relative magnitudes of the shifts of the labor supply and demand curves. A difference-in-difference-in-differences model having older women, older men, and young men simultaneously as the control group suggests that neither the employment nor the hourly wages of young women are affected. The second essay explores why married men have higher hourly earnings and employment propensity than otherwise comparable single men. In a fixed effects regression, which controls for the selection of more productive men into marriage, married men do not experience faster growth in earnings and employment rate before marriage. Rather, when marriage takes place, the earnings of married men start increasing relative to those of single men. Also, that South Korean men have a greater earnings growth after marriage than U.S. men is consistent with the national difference in the degree of specialization within married households. Married men are more likely to work than single men only for the first few years of marriage, and single men outperform married men afterwards. The final essay studies why gender differences in earnings and earnings growth exist among new Korean college graduates before women take time off of work for marriage and motherhood. I find that women do not face an initial earnings gap after graduating college compared to men who finished military service. The lower earnings that women receive can be entirely explained by the difference in age at graduation between men and women. However, women's earnings grow slower than those of men who finished military service. This is partly because a greater percentage of women graduate from colleges of education, which provide slower earnings growth than other types of colleges. Most of the gender difference in earnings growth remains unexplained.
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Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1989.
Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 68-71).

Basic theory analyses the entrepreneur's role in the economic system. Of the four conventional factors of production, namely: land, labour, capital, and organization (or entrepreneurship), objective demand and supply schedules are possible for the first three. By contrast, a demand curve for entrepreneurship cannot be drawn, as it is for the entrepreneurs themselves to decide whether or not to enter the production process as a freelancer. Harvey Leibenstein, a development economist, however, constructed a supply curve for entrepreneurs, linking their anticipations of per capita income growth with the rate of expansion of entrepreneurship in terms of their contribution to such growth in incomes. Hence many theorists portray the corporate drives of entrepreneurs as forward-looking ones. How, then, can biographies most satisfactorily discuss such drives in a chronological narrative of a life from cradle to the grave? Childhood influences, such as premature responsibilities through a parent's death, and struggles for recognition in early adulthood have to be brought out, as well as the precise explanation of finally winning through.

In this chapter an attempt is made, in the light of evidence from the United States and Canada, to explain in general terms the ebb and flow of private school options. Both public and private school growth and decline are affected by demography. Thus, a massive drop in Catholic school enrollment from 1966 to 1981 reflects, in part, a birthrate decline and a migration of Catholics from central cities, where many Catholic schools existed, to suburbs, where there were few Catholic schools. But unlike public school attendance, which rarely involves user fees and is considered normal if not laudatory in the United States and parts of Canada, private school attendance generally occurs when parents decide to depart from normal practice, incurring extra cost, extra effort (many private school patrons must drive their children considerable distances to school), disruption of their children’s friendships (many private school students are not in the schools which most of their neighborhood friends attend), and sometimes social disapproval. To a far greater extent than public school enrollment, then, private school enrollment depends on patron motivations. To return to the Catholic example: Even if the Catholic birthrate were high and Catholic schools were universally accessible, those schools would soon collapse unless many Catholic parents considered them worth extra expense and effort. Also, while public schools are everywhere available, parents often cannot find the private schools they prefer. Some schools exist primarily for certain religious and ethnic groups. Schools of some types are available only in a few major cities. Some schools are beyond the fiscal reach of most people. It is no accident, in this regard, that religious options are more plentiful in private schools than curricular or pedagogical options. Most religiously oriented schools enjoy subsidies from religious groups. Many schools open in the facilities of churches and synagogues, thus avoiding major expense. Sometimes churches and other denominational agencies directly sponsor schools. Even when they do not, they often assist by taking special collections, or their members provide free labor. Many Jewish day schools are subsidized through Jewish community funds.

Most ultra-Orthodox Jews, a growing percentage of the total population, lack the skills to work in a modern economy, having studied little or no math and science beyond primary school (their curriculum focuses almost entirely on religious texts such as the Torah and Talmud). As a result, more than 60 percent live below the poverty line, compared with 12 percent among non-Haredi Jews. Most also opt out of military service, which is compulsory for other Israelis. The net effect: as the Haredi community expands, the burden of both taxation and conscription falls on fewer and fewer Israelis. Trends towards increased fertility, decreased labor force participation, and increased supply of time to religious studies in the ultra-Orthodox community are explained in terms of the behavior of a “club” that has strengthened its norms of religious stringency in an attempt to brace exclusion. The economic self- preservation of the “club” is akin to the old age security motive of bringing children, where children is a means for parents from their income (female work income, child allowances, and other government subsidies) generating years to their old age unproductive years. The parents to minimize “defection” from the community do not endow the children labor- market skills.

We develop and estimate a model of child care markets that endogenizes both demand and supply. On the demand side, families with a child make consumption, labor supply, and child-care decisions within a static, unitary household model. On the supply side, child care providers make entry, price, and quality decisions under monopolistic competition. Child development is a function of the time spent with each parent and at the child care center; these inputs vary in their impact. We estimate the structural parameters of the model using the 2003 Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, which contains information on parental employment and wages, child care choices, child development, and center quality. We use our estimates to evaluate the impact of several policies, including vouchers, cash transfers, quality regulations, and public provision. Among these, a combination of quality regulation and vouchers for working families leads to the greatest gains in average child development and to a large expansion in child care use and female labor supply, all at a relatively low fiscal cost.