Maternity protection policies have the objective of supporting mothers' access to equal opportunity and equal treatment in the workplace. We provide two examples showing that beside this direct goal, short-run policy incentives can also affect decisions involving long-term commitment. First, we examine how dismissal protection of pregnant women affects fertility decisions and show that women at the risk of job loss use pregnancy as precautionary strategy. Second, we show that earnings dependent parental leave benefits available to the mother affect the father’s decision to acknowledge paternity.
Veranstaltungsreihe: Special Lecture Series (en)
The IAB Special Lecture Series invites outstanding international researchers across the Social Sciences to present their current work. Guest lecturers are selected on excellent academic merit and typically have made significant contributions to their respective fields and continue to actively shape international research agendas.
Changing Gender Status Beliefs? Implications for Gender Inequality in the Labor Market
We draw on research on status processes and cultural change to develop predictions about gender status beliefs in the United States. We expect that
- while explicitly men and women may not distinguish competency and worth by gender, they do so implicitly,
- that younger respondents, especially women, hold less consensual gender status beliefs, and
- men are less likely to alter their gender status beliefs due to loss aversion.
We conduct two studies to assess these arguments. The first uses novel nationally-representative data to describe the distributions of status beliefs in the US population; the second demonstrates the importance of these beliefs for allocating rewards by gender. Combined, the studies demonstrate the distribution of gender status beliefs by age and gender, and the implications for gender inequality, thereby illustrating the role of cultural status beliefs for maintaining gender stratification and the potential role of cohort change for changing such beliefs. Finally, we discuss promising approaches to reduce the impact of gender status beliefs in labor market processes.
How Americans Respond to Idiosyncratic and Exogenous Changes in Household Wealth and Unearned Income
We study how Americans respond to idiosyncratic and exogenous changes in household wealth and unearned income. Our analyses combine administrative data on U.S. lottery winners with an event-study design that exploits variation in the timing of lottery wins. Our first contribution is to estimate the earnings responses to these windfall gains, finding significant and sizable wealth and income effects. On average, an extra dollar of unearned income in a given period reduces pre-tax labor earnings by about 50 cents, decreases total labor taxes by 10 cents, and increases consumption by 60 cents. These effects are heterogeneous across the income distribution, with households in higher quartiles of the income distribution reducing their earnings by a larger amount.
Our second contribution is to develop and apply a rich life-cycle model in which heterogeneous households face non-linear taxes and make earnings choices along both intensive and extensive margins. By mapping this model to our estimated earnings responses, we obtain informative bounds on the impacts of two policy reforms: an introduction of UBI and an increase in top marginal tax rates. Our last contribution is to study how additional wealth and unearned income affect a wide range of behavior, including geographic mobility and neighborhood choice, retirement decisions and labor market exit, family formation and dissolution, entry into entrepreneurship, and job-to-job mobility.