Knowledge that Transforms

Over the last two generations, women in Soviet Russia reached the highest labor force participation rate in the world. As everywhere else, the process was accompanied by a sharp rise in their educational attainment and a similarly sharp decline in fertility. On the basis of data about families of Soviet emigrants during the early 1970s, it is shown that Soviet women respond to the same economic variables that create similar trends in market economies. Socialist ideology and Soviet growth strategy help on the one hand to expedite the process, but on the other amplify the contradiction between women's family and labor market roles and result in relatively low wages for women.

Affirmative action may be broadly conceived of as pursuing either the goal of reducing discrimination or that of redistributing jobs and earnings. I attempt to infer the ends of affirmative action policy by analyzing the historical record of enforcement. Optimal enforcement strategies are developed for both the antidiscrimination and the earnings redistribution models and then compared with new data on the actual targeting of affirmative action compliance reviews during the late 1970s. I find that establishments with very low proportions of minority or female workers are not significantly more likely to be reviewed, but that white-collar-intensive establishments are more likely to be reviewed. This indicates the shortcomings of the antidiscrimination model in explaining the OFCCP's behavior and suggests the potential usefulness of the earnings redistribution model.

This paper summarizes some facts on female work in Germany and presents some recent econometric explorations. The econometric method adopted is the TOBIT procedure, which allows one to estimate labor supply functions including both hours worked and participation. The general finding is that it is necessary to distinguish among several groups of females: while work participation of young single women decreased substantially, married women have a higher participation rate today than in earlier years. In addition, income elasticities of labor supply and their decomposition are estimated but several caveats regarding these estimates are in order.

This paper examines labor force participation of women in France and its evolution over time. Cross-section estimates of a logit model measure the effects on participation of wives' wages, husbands' earnings, families' unearned income, and number of children. They are found to be in accordance with theory. Applied to historical data, these estimates overpredict actual changes. A new specification of the participation model, using as endogenous variable the fraction of lifetime after leaving school spent in the labor force, shows that the effect of the main explanatory variable, education, changed over time. This model gives accurate predictions.

This paper makes use of panel data to consider the effects of unionization, schooling, sickness, and unemployment on individual earnings. Our results may be summarized as follows. The unionization effect is around 15%-20%. This measure is consistently estimated controlling for both fixed individual attributes and serially uncorrelated measurement error. Sickness has little immediate impact, but there is some indication that after 4 years earnings have fallen permanently by around 8% consequent on a 10-week spell of sickness. A spell of unemployment, on the other hand, leads to a sharp fall in earnings, but this effect decays rapidly leaving the possibility of a small permanent impact. Finally, controlling for all fixed individual attributes, we are unable to pin down the schooling effect with any accuracy owing to the absence of instruments that are both valid and effective within the data set.

Since 1964 all the increase in female labor force participation in Australia can be attributed to married women. About 90% of the increase can be attributed to women employed part time. The paper argues that aggregate female participation rate equations cannot be regarded as labor supply curves. The female wage rate relative to that of males is exogenously determined by wage-fixing authorities above market-clearing rates, and the excess supply of labor is not adequately measured by the unemployment rate. Married women and part-time workers have a high propensity to bypass the unemployment pool when leaving or seeking a job. Participation equations are dominated by employment demand for sex-segregated jobs.

A frequent practice in empirical work is to "preanalyze" the data via various sample inclusion rules. Truncation of "outliers" is common. These procedures are a form of sample censoring imposed by the investigator. Such censoring produces effects familiar from the sample selection literature. This paper investigates the question why an investigator might want to censor a sample and what the costs are. In an empirical example, using a variance components model of a wage equation, potential inconsistency problems are highlighted. The results indicate that while the slope coefficients, <tex-math>\hatβ</tex-math>, may typically be less sensitive to censoring than the variance components, some common forms of censoring also markedly affect <tex-math>\hatβ</tex-math>. Finally, a Bayesian estimator that incorporates prior information in a flexible way was developed. The usual Bayesian procedure was reversed, by using the Bayesian estimator to recover the prior beliefs that an investigator imposes by any proposed truncation of outliers. Especially in large samples, extremely dogmatic prior beliefs may be imposed when outliers are eliminated. Prior distributions of the type developed in the paper may be used by the investigator to clarify the nature of his prior beliefs revealed by a willingness to truncate data points and to assess whether or not any proposed truncation accurately reflects thoes beliefs.

This paper presents an empirical analysis of how job search requirements under various government programs influence job search behavior. The analysis indicates that job search requirements exert a significant impact on certain aspects of the job search process, but not those that generally lead to a higher probability of employment. It is also found that persons who utilize intensively search activities that result in direct employer contact have much shorter durations of unemployment than persons who do not utilize such activities intensively. It is speculated that altering job search requirements to include more direct employer contact could lead to a significant reduction in unemployment.

This study analyzes the manner in which certain favorable shifts in labor demand affect job search. Although all shifts increase reservation wages, they do not necessarily decrease expected unemployment spell durations and increase expected post-unemployment wages, so that upward-sloping short-run Phillips curves may occur. A result due to Chamberlain is used to demonstrate that if the wage offer distribution is restricted to be logconcave, two of the shifts guarantee downward-sloping Phillips curves. For one of these two shifts, previous research by Flinn and Heckman used logconcavity in a different manner to achieve properly shaped Phillips curves.

Economists have often found it useful to look at the average length of an unemployment spell in evaluating labor market conditions and in considering the labor market experience of the unemployed. Usually this statistic has to be estimated from grouped observations on interrupted (incomplete) unemployment spells. This paper is a comparative study of some nonparametric and parametric methods of estimating this quantity using Australian Department of Social Security data on unemployment benefit recipients.