Advanced Search

Selection, Investment, and Women's Relative Wages Over Time

Contents:

Author Info

  • Casey B. Mulligan

    (University of Chicago and NBER)

  • Yona Rubinstein

    (Brown University, CEPR, and IZA)

Abstract

In theory, growing wage inequality within gender should cause women to invest more in their market productivity and should differentially pull able women into the workforce. Our paper uses Heckman's two-step estimator and identification at infinity on repeated Current Population Survey cross sections to calculate relative wage series for women since 1970 that hold constant the composition of skills. We find that selection into the female full-time full-year workforce shifted from negative in the 1970s to positive in the 1990s, and that the majority of the apparent narrowing of the gender wage gap reflects changes in female workforce composition. We find the same types of composition changes by measuring husbands' wages and National Longitudinal Survey IQ data as proxies for unobserved skills. Our findings help to explain why growing wage equality between genders coincided with growing inequality within gender. (c) 2008 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology..

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
File URL: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/qjec.2008.123.3.1061
File Function: link to full text
Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.

Bibliographic Info

Article provided by MIT Press in its journal Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Volume (Year): 123 (2008)
Issue (Month): 3 (August)
Pages: 1061-1110
Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML (with abstract), plain text (with abstract), BibTeX, RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite), ReDIF
Handle: RePEc:tpr:qjecon:v:123:y:2008:i:3:p:1061-1110

Contact details of provider:
Web page: http://mitpress.mit.edu/journals/

Order Information:
Web: http://mitpress.mit.edu/journal-home.tcl?issn=00335533

For corrections or technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Christopher F. Baum).

Related research

Keywords:

References

No references listed on IDEAS
You can help add them by filling out this form.

Citations

Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
Cited by:
  1. Ross Levine & Alexey Levkov & Yona Rubinstein, 2011. "Racial Discrimination and Competition," CEP Discussion Papers dp1069, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
  2. Bar, Michael & Leukhina, Oksana, 2005. "Accounting for Changes in Labor Force Participation of Married Women: The Case of the U.S. since 1959," MPRA Paper 17264, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised Jun 2009.
  3. Mussida, C. & Picchio, M., 2011. "The Trend over Time of the GenderWage Gap in Italy," Discussion Paper 2011-093, Tilburg University, Center for Economic Research.
  4. Claudia Olivetti, . "Gender and the Labour Market: An International Perspective and the case of Italy," Boston University - Department of Economics - Working Papers Series wp2009-010, Boston University - Department of Economics.
  5. Pedro Carneiro & Sokbae 'Simon' Lee, 2009. "Trends in quality-adjusted skill premia in the United States, 1960-2000," CeMMAP working papers CWP02/09, Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice, Institute for Fiscal Studies.
  6. Hongbin Cai & J. Vernon Henderson & Qinghua Zhang, 2009. "China's Land Market Auctions: Evidence of Corruption," NBER Working Papers 15067, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

Lists

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:tpr:qjecon:v:123:y:2008:i:3:p:1061-1110

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Christopher F. Baum).

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.