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Using Korean data, this study investigates whether son-favoring ideas or the preference for sons affect fertility decisions. Son-favoring fertility behavior in Korea is of interest because the sex ratio at birth has recovered to a natural level after having been very skewed. To isolate the effects of the preference for sons from the effects of the surrounding environment, we compare the fertility behavior of individuals living in the same region but who were born in different regions or years. Exploiting the male-female gap in educational achievement at the parents’ time and place of birth as exogenous variation in the 2000 Census Korea 2% sample, we find that the strength of son preference formed at an early age is associated with the strength of son-favoring fertility behavior as adults. Our results indicate that parents are more likely to have a third child if they happen to have only daughters as their first two children. More importantly, this tendency is stronger if parents were born in a spatiotemporal region with more skewed gender gap in educational investment. These findings are robust against various alternative specifications, including endogenous migration issues.

In credit-constrained households, some family members who would otherwise not work participate in the labor market. This particular supply of labor, however, is expected to decrease when their families overcome credit constraints. To examine this family investment hypothesis, we develop a test which exploits the dynamic features of the labor supply of married foreign-born women in the United States. Empirical findings, based on the matched March Current Population Survey, are consistent with the hypothesis. This paper also finds that previous results which refute the hypothesis are reversed when the sample is confined to women working in low-skill jobs.

Count models often best describe the nature of data in health economics, but the presence of fixed effects with excess zeros and overdispersion strictly limits the choice of estimation methods. This paper presents a quasi-conditional likelihood method to consistently estimate models with excess zeros and unobserved individual heterogeneity when the true generating process is unknown. Monte Carlo simulation studies show that our zero-inflated quasi-conditional maximum likelihood (ZI-QCML) estimator outperforms other methods and is robust to distributional misspecifications. We apply the ZI-QCML estimator to analyze the frequency of doctor visits.

This article investigates the time to first birth, treating coresidence with husband’s parents and labor supply as endogenous and using representative data on Taiwanese married women born during 1933–1968. We use a full-information maximum likelihood estimator for a duration model with endogenous binary variables. Results controlling for endogeneity suggest that both coresidence and working are associated with a delay in childbearing, reversing the effect of coresidence on the timing of first birth but not that of working. Women in earlier cohorts tend to choose coresidency and not working, and an increasing number of women from later cohorts choose to do both or to work only.

This paper presents new evidence on whether foreign-born workers assimilate. While the existing literature focuses on the convergence/divergence of mean wages, this study extends the analysis to the distribution of wages by looking at wage mobility. We draw on a first-order Markov-switching model to measure the foreign-native gap in year-to-year transition probabilities from one decile group to another of a wage distribution, where the deciles are determined by a native sample. Using the matched Current Population Survey for 1996 to 2008, our results suggest that age, marital status, and education are important in wage mobility for both foreign-born and native-born individuals and that the majority of foreign-born workers fail to assimilate. Immigrants in top decile groups are more likely to keep up or improve relative to natives, while those in middle and bottom decile groups tend to fall behind. We conclude that the widening foreign-native gap in mean wages with U.S. experience is mostly driven by the middle and bottom decile group immigrants from Central and South America and the bottom decile group immigrants from Asia.

This paper provides a human capital theory‐based explanation for the presence of a permanent component in earnings levels as well as individual heterogeneity in earnings slopes. We incorporate uncertainty about the future rental rates of human capital into a life‐cycle human capital investment model and obtain an earnings equation implied by the solution to the worker's optimal investment decision. While heterogeneous growth stems from individual heterogeneity in the ability of human capital production, permanent errors are induced by the response of optimal investments to transitory rental rate shocks. We empirically show that both components are present.

Mulligan and Rubinstein (2008) (MR) argued that changing selection of working females on unobservable characteristics, from negative in the 1970s to positive in the 1990s, accounted for nearly the entire closing of the gender wage gap. We argue that their female wage equation estimates are inconsistent. Correcting this error substantially weakens the role of the rising selection bias (39 % versus 78 %) and strengthens the contribution of declining discrimination (42 % versus 7 %). Our findings resonate better with related literature. We also explain why our finding of positive selection in the 1970s provides additional support for MR’s main hypothesis that an exogenous rise in the market value of unobservable characteristics contributed to the closing of the gender gap.

This paper takes a new approach to testing whether employer learning is public or private. We show that public and private learning schemes make two distinct predictions about the curvature of wage growth paths when there is a job change, because the amount of information transferred to a new employer about workers' productivity is smaller in the private learning case than in the public learning case. This prediction enables us to account for individual and job-match heterogeneity, which was not possible in previous tests. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79), we find that employer learning is public for high school graduates and private for college graduates.

This paper takes a new approach to testing whether employer learning is public or private. We show that public and private learning schemes make two distinct predictions about the curvature of the wage growth path when a worker changes jobs, because less information about the worker's productivity is transferred to a new employer in the private learning case than in the public learning case. This prediction enables us to account for individual and job‐match heterogeneity, which was not possible in previous tests. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we find that employer learning is public for high‐school graduates and private for college graduates.

Previous papers on testing for statistical discrimination require variables that employers do not observe directly, but are observed by researchers or data on employer-provided performance measures. This paper develops a test that does not rely on these specific variables. The proposed test can be performed with individual-level cross-section data on employment status, potential experience, and some variables on which discrimination is based, such as race, gender, and education. This paper shows that if employers statistically discriminate among unexperienced workers, but learn about their productivity over time, then the unemployment rates for discriminated groups will be higher than those for non-discriminated groups at the time of labor market entry and that the unemployment rates for discriminated groups will decline faster than those for non-discriminated groups with experience. Using the March CPS for 1977-2010, the preliminary results suggest that employers statistically discriminate on the basis of race and education, but not on the basis of gender.

This paper presents a new test for the family investment hypothesis (FIH). We show that a simple two-period labor supply model produces testable implications on the work hours and occupational choices for married women. In credit-constrained households, to support the family, married women work in dead-end jobs that do not necessarily require much skill. The support decreases as they overcome credit-constraints. We analyze the occupation choices for married women using a first-order Markov switching model. Our findings, based on the matched March CPS for 1996-2002, are consistent with the FIH. We replicate the annual hours worked specifications used in previous papers and demonstrate that the conventional results get reversed when the sample is confined to women who work in dead-end jobs.

This paper presents new evidence on whether foreign-born workers assimilate, which we define as the degree to which the wages of foreign-born workers approach those of comparable native-born workers with additional time spent in the United States. The key econometric challenge is to separate wage growth due to assimilation from composition effects. The composition of immigrant population varies over time due to variation in initial skill levels at year of entry and also because of selective return migration. While much of the existing literature relies on cross-section data, we use longitudinal data on native-born and foreign-born populations which allows us to control for initial skill composition. An advantage of using the Current Population Survey (CPS) is that one can construct cross-section samples by ignoring its longitudinal structure. We compare cross-section and panel models of foreign-native gap in wage growth, and the results suggest that analyses based on repeated cross-section studies are biased upward by fixed unobserved heterogeneity. Controlling for this heterogeneity reverses the conventional result of economic assimilation. Overall, we find little evidence of a narrowing of the foreign-native gap in economic performance. New immigrants from Central and South America earn lower wages than natives, and this gap widens with time in the U.S. labor market. The wages of new immigrants from Europe and Asia exceed those of natives and there is no strong evidence of convergence. We account for sample attrition in the presence of nonrandom outmigration and find that our results are robust to panel attrition.

This paper develops a method that accounts for non-ignorable sample attrition in the presence of population attrition for use with a non-representative panel sample. The method is applied to obtain attrition-correcting weights for the native and immigrant samples in the matched Current Population Survey (CPS). Of the two samples, the immigrant sample suffers from sample attrition due to changes in residence as well as population attrition caused by selective return migration. When there is population attrition, the second period cross-section is not representative of the first period population. Therefore, the existing sample attrition-correcting method developed by Hirano, Imbens, Ridder, and Rubin (2001) and Bhattacharya (2008) cannot be applied. We resolve this problem by generating a counterfactual, but representative cross-section prior to applying their method. The counterfactual sample can be obtained by weighting the second period cross-section by one minus the probability of population attrition. We show that the sample attrition and the population attrition processes are separately identified. This is useful because samples usually do not indicate which missing observations are due to sample attrition and which are due to population attrition. The attrition-correcting weights, once obtained, can be used in various studies of immigration using the CPS.