We revisit the impact of remittances on educational attainment of school-age children in Nepal, paying particular attention to differences between girls and boys. A heightened interest in understanding the impact of remitting practices on a variety of economic variables has emerged as remittances to developing countries continue to rise. In Nepal, the World Bank reports that remittances amounted to $1.2 billion (US dollars) in 2005, while GDP was $8.2 billion and official development assistance totaled $425 million (World Bank 2007). We use the 1995/1996 Nepal Living Standards Survey (NLSS) to examine the impact of remittances on human capital investments for female and male children. If remittances do affect human capital positively, then not only will remittances affect long-run growth in Nepal, but the opportunities for women in Nepal should improve as the female population becomes more educated. The effect of remittances on human capital investment is unclear a priori. Increasing income through remittances may increase investment in children’s schooling by relaxing household budget and capital constraints. Conversely, household absenteeism pressures children to work in the home, reducing time for education. Our data provide an opportunity to separate the effect of household disruption from the income effect of remittances on the decision to invest in schooling. We are able to measure the number of adults living outside the household so that we may control for absenteeism in estimating the impact of remittances on household schooling choices. We ask if the impact varies by gender and age group (young child versus older child). Our results indicate that young children benefit more from remittances, but the benefits, controlling How Do Remittances Affect Human Capital Formation of School-Age Boys and Girls?

Employment verification systems covered about one out of four people hired in the United States in 2010. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of state-level employment verification mandates on the employment and wages of likely unauthorized workers across the entire United States between 2004 and 2010. We find that E-Verify mandates, particularly those covering all employers, significantly curtail the employment likelihood of likely unauthorized male and female workers. However, they appear to have mixed effects on wages and may redistribute likely unauthorized labor towards industries often benefiting from specific exclusions, such as agriculture or food services.

During recessions, the focus on male job losses may overshadow other important outcome variables. We examine the effects of economic downturns on occupational segregation by gender, using staffing data from over 6 million private-sector US establishments from 1966-2010. Consistent with the literature, we find a downward trend in occupational segregation that is diminishing over time. Drawing upon Rubery's (1988) work on women and recessions, we find support for both the buffer and the segmentation hypotheses. On net, however, the buffer hypothesis appears to dominate providing evidence that in periods of economic decline the trend of decreasing economic dissimilarity is interrupted.

Gender Differences in the Labor Market: Impact of IRCA by Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes, Cynthia Bansak and Steven Raphael. Published in volume 97, issue 2, pages 412-416 of American Economic Review, May 2007