Socioeconomic Inequality and Mobility
Paper Session
Saturday, Jan. 6, 2024 8:00 AM - 10:00 AM (CST)
- Chair: Minchul Yum, University of Southampton
Shaping Inequality and Intergenerational Persistence of Poverty: Free College, Better Schools or Generous Transfers?
Abstract
TBAChild Skill Production: Accounting for Parental and Market-based Time and Goods Investments
Abstract
This paper studies the multidimensional nature of investments in children within a dynamic framework. In particular, we examine the roles of parental time investments, purchased home goods/services inputs, and market-based child care services. We first document strong increases in total investment expenditures by maternal education; yet expenditure shares, which skew heavily towards parental time, vary little with parental schooling. Second, we develop an intergenerational lifecycle model with multiple child investment inputs to study these patterns and the impacts of policies that alter the prices of different inputs. We analytically characterize investment behavior, focusing on the substitutability of different investment inputs and the way parental skills affect the productivity of family-based inputs. Third, we develop an estimation strategy that exploits intratemporal optimality conditions based on relative demand to estimate substitutability between inputs, the relative productivity of different inputs, and the role played by parental education. Fourth, we use data from the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to estimate the skill production technology for children ages 12 and younger. Finally, we use counterfactual simulations to explore the extent and sources of variation in investments across families, as well as investment responses to changes in input prices. We find that variation in prices explains 48% of the overall variance in investment expenditures, and differences in wages explain more than half of the investment expenditure gap between college-educated and non-college-educated parents. We further show that accounting for the degree of input complementarity implied by our estimates has important implications for the responses of individual inputs to any price change and for the responses in total investments and skill accumulation to large (but not small) price changes.Task Requirements, Time Requirements, and the Gender Gap in Jobs and Pay
Abstract
Non-routine cognitively demanding jobs require cognitive ability as well as non-routine hours. In this paper we study the implications of this complementarity on the gender gap in occupational choices and pay. If women have a comparative dis-advantage in providing non-routine hours, they are less likely to sort into highly paying jobs which require both cognitive ability and non-routine hours. Using DOT and O*NET data and measures of time requirements at the occupational level we indeed find that non-routine cognitive task requirements are highly correlated with time requirements. We also find that women are less likely to sort into non-routine cognitive tasks, and more likely to sort into routine tasks. Using the NLSY, we find that this gender gap in sorting into non-routine cognitive tasks is especially pronounced among high AFQT women and men. These forces play an important role in accounting for the slowdown in the convergence of occupational sorting and wages.Discussant(s)
Hyejin Park
,
University of Montréal
Minseon Park
,
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Ami Ko
,
Georgetown University
Gueyon Kim
,
University of California-Santa Cruz
JEL Classifications
- E2 - Consumption, Saving, Production, Investment, Labor Markets, and Informal Economy
- J6 - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers