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Title: ESSAYS ON FEMALE LABOR SUPPLY
Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis
Publication Year: 2021
ISBN: 9798516080289
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Abstract: The first chapter examines how women's local labor supply decisions affect the national gender wage gap. The national wage is the sum of weighted local wages, which combines local wages and local employment weights. Here, I emphasize the role of local employment weights, especially for women, which can reflect worker's labor supply decisions across locations. I show that, only for highly-educated women, there is a significant negative relationship between employment-to-population ratio and average log wage across locations. This relationship is stronger for married women with children. Since fewer highly-educated women are working in high-wage cities while more highly-educated women are working in low-wage cities (i.e. different employment weights), I argue that the national-level gender wage gap would be overstated. To test this hypothesis, I use two empirical strategies. First, I conduct a counterfactual gender wage gap analysis by replacing women's local employment weights with men's and show that the log wage difference between men and women with an advanced degree can be reduced by 2 percent. Second, I estimate the college-educated gender wage gap with location controls, which is 5 percent less than the gap without location controls. In the second chapter, I study how occupational characteristics can affect women's timing of fertility and how women's labor supply after childbirth changes depending on the timing of fertility and their occupations. By considering occupational characteristics of time constraints and human capital depreciation among skilled occupations in the US, I find that college-educated women who work in high-hours occupations tend to delay their fertility. Moreover, I observe that a similar pattern of delaying fertility arises in occupations with interpersonal relationships, autonomy, and competitiveness. Finally, I show that women in high-hours occupations who delay fertility tend to decrease their labor supply after childbirth, mainly by reducing working hours or dropping out of the labor force rather than switching occupations.
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Authors: Park, Hyerim
Institution: The University of Mississippi
Department: Department of Economics
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Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Gender, Labor Force and Occupational Structure
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