Severe gender imbalances coupled with stark income differences across countries are driving an increase in cross-border marriages in many Asian countries. I theoretically and empirically study who marries whom and how couples allocate marital surplus in Taiwanese and Vietnamese marriage markets. I find that Taiwanese men are selected from the middle level of the human capital distribution and that Vietnamese women are positively selected for cross-border marriages. I show that changes in the costs of cross-border marriage affect the welfare of Taiwanese and Vietnamese who do not participate in cross-border marriages by altering marriage rates, matching partners, and intrahousehold allocations.
Rehabilitating convicted criminals is challenging; indeed, an important share of them return to prison only a few years after their release.Thus, finding effective ways of encouraging crime desistance, particularly among young individuals, has become an important policy goal to reduce crime and incarceration rates.This paper provides causal evidence that the local institutions of the neighborhood that receives young individuals after prison matter.Specifically, we show that the opening of an Evangelical church reduces twelve-months re-incarceration rates among property crime offenders by more than 10 percentage points.This effect represents a drop of 16% in the probability of returning to prison for this group of individuals.We find smaller and less precise effects for more severe types of crime.We discuss two classes of mechanisms that could explain our results: religiosity and social support.We provide evidence that the social support provided by evangelical churches is an important driver of our findings.This suggests that non-religious local institutions could also play an important role in the rehabilitation of former inmates.
This paper analyzes whether technological change improves equality of labor market opportunities by increasing the returns to skills relative to the returns to parental background. We find that in Germany during the 1990s, the introduction of computer technologies improved the access to technology-adopting occupations for workers with low-educated parents and reduced their wage penalty within these occupations. We also show that this significantly contributed to a decline in the overall wage penalty experienced by workers from disadvantaged parental backgrounds over this time period. Competing mechanisms, such as skill-specific labor supply shocks and skill upgrading, do not explain these findings.
This article uses state-specific timing of legal changes and data from the Current Population Survey and National Longitudinal Survey of Young Women to estimate effects of confidential access to the pill in late adolescence on earnings, labor force participation, and human capital accumulation over the life cycle, finding no evidence of effects. These results are contrary to past research, which imposed a restriction on the regression model that this article shows explains the past results.
We study the US labor market transitions using a latent variable approach, explicitly modeling the persistent misclassification process and the non-Markovian nature of the underlying true labor force dynamics. A closed-form global identification for misclassification probabilities and labor transition probabilities is established through an eigenvalue-eigenvector decomposition. Contrary to existing studies, our empirical results suggest that the observed data have understated the true mobility in labor force statuses after we account for persistence in both the misclassification errors and the latent true labor force dynamics.
Exploiting cross–commuting zone differences in age composition among the old, this paper estimates the impact of retirements on youth labor market outcomes over the period 1980–2017. In commuting zones where fewer workers retire because of the initial age structure, there is no evidence of significant effects on youth employment, but the share of younger workers in high-skill jobs declines, while the share of younger workers in low-skill jobs rises. Fewer retirements also leads to declining youth wages and lower job mobility. This suggests that the retirement slowdown in recent decades has contributed to deteriorating early-career outcomes.
We consider how adverse selection affects the efficiency of turnover and postturnover job assignments. In the model, when a high-ability worker is not promoted at the worker’s current employer because of a lack of available managerial openings, it is efficient for the worker to move to a firm seeking a high-ability worker to promote. But this type of turnover does not occur given asymmetric information and adverse selection. We show that up-or-out contracts can be an efficient response to this inefficiency, where our analysis matches several observations concerning real-world promotion decisions and practices related to up-or-out.
Using a two-level randomized experiment, we find that job search assistance (JSA) reduces unemployment among the treated but also creates displacement effects. Analyses of mechanisms show that vacancy referrals from caseworkers to job seekers explain the positive effects for the treated by helping the job seekers apply to the most relevant jobs earlier. We also find that the overall assessment of JSA hinges on how the displacement effects hit the labor market and to what extent firms react by opening new vacancies. The displacement is larger in weak labor markets, and we find no displacement of resources.
In addition to realized earnings and employment shocks, forward-looking individuals are presumed to condition their consumption and labor supply decisions on their subjective beliefs about future labor market risks. This paper uses rich panel data to document considerable individual heterogeneity in earnings growth expectations and in the perceived likelihood of voluntary and involuntary job exits. We examine how expectations evolve over the working life and business cycle and how they covary with macroeconomic expectations and personal experiences. While largely consistent with patterns in realized outcomes, our findings highlight the unanticipated nature of the pandemic recession and the ensuing resignation wave.
This study explores relationships between parental resource trajectories and child development and their implications for intergenerational mobility. By modifying the child skill formation technology to incorporate new skills emerging during adolescence, we analyze the importance of the timing of family resources on life outcomes, educational attainment, and participation in crime. Parental financial resources partially offset deficiencies in nonpecuniary inputs to children’s human capital. Estimates of the intergenerational influence on child outcomes are strongly influenced by the choice of lifetime versus snapshot parental income measures. The most predictive ages of children when family resources are measured vary by the outcome analyzed.