Full Citation
Title: The Role of Family and Gender in the Transfer of and Returns to Human Capital
Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis
Publication Year: 2018
ISBN: 9780438112599
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Abstract: This dissertation explores the role of family and gender in understanding the disparities in human capital accumulation and corresponding disparities in labor market outcomes. The first chapter explores the relationship between workers’ wages and the gender of their supervisor, conditioning on the occupational gender composition. It develops a theoretical model suggesting that supervisors’ task assignment accuracy is affected disparately in occupations of different gender types, leading to varying degrees of skill mismatch among workers. This leads to average wage differences between workers with female supervisors and those with male supervisors in occupations of different gender types. Consistent with the theoretical predictions, the empirical evidence suggests that workers have better occupation-skill matches and higher average wages if they work with female supervisors in predominantly female occupations, compared to those with male supervisors; the opposite is true for workers in predominantly male occupations. Although not significant at the early career stage, supervisor wage effects emerge as a worker’s career develops. These findings emphasize the importance of supervisors’ task assignment accuracy in workplace gender wage disparity, and underscore the necessity of integrating minority managers to the “gendered” organizational contexts. The second chapter examines the extent to which children enter occupations that are different from their father’s occupation, but require similar skills, which we call task following. We distinguish between task followers and occupational followers, considering the possibility that fathers can transfer task specific human capital either through investments or genetic endowments to their children. We show that there is indeed substantial task following, beyond occupational following and that task following is associated with a wage premium of around 5% over otherwise identical workers employed in a job with the same primary task. The wage premium is robust to controls for industry, occupation categories and occupation characteristics. The premium is largest for followers in non-routine cognitive jobs and college graduates.
Url: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5474&context=etd
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Authors: Chen, Liwen
Institution: University of South Carolina
Department: Economics
Advisor: Ozturk, Orgul D.
Degree: Ph.D.
Publisher Location: Columbia, South Carolina
Pages: 151
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Family and Marriage, Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Other
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