IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/upj/weupjo/16-255.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Are There Returns to Experience at Low-Skill Jobs? Evidence from Single Mothers in the United States over the 1990s

Author

Listed:
  • Adam Looney

    (The Brookings Institution)

  • Day Manoli

    (University of Texas at Austin)

Abstract

Policy changes in the United States in the 1990s resulted in sizable increases in employment rates of single mothers. We show that this increase led to a large and abrupt increase in work experience for single mothers with young children. We then examine the economic return to this increase in experience for affected single mothers. Despite the increases in experience, single mothers’ real wages and employment have remained relatively unchanged. The empirical analysis suggests that an additional year of experience increases single mothers’ wage rates by less than 2 percent, a percentage lower than previous estimates in the literature.

Suggested Citation

  • Adam Looney & Day Manoli, 2016. "Are There Returns to Experience at Low-Skill Jobs? Evidence from Single Mothers in the United States over the 1990s," Upjohn Working Papers 16-255, W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:upj:weupjo:16-255
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1273&context=up_workingpapers
    Download Restriction: This material is copyrighted. Permission is required to reproduce any or all parts.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jonah B. Gelbach, 2002. "Public Schooling for Young Children and Maternal Labor Supply," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 92(1), pages 307-322, March.
    2. Ted Joyce & Robert Kaestner & Sanders Korenman, 2002. "On the validity of retrospective assessments of pregnancy intention," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 39(1), pages 199-213, February.
    3. Bruce D. Meyer, 2010. "The Effects of the Earned Income Tax Credit and Recent Reforms," NBER Chapters, in: Tax Policy and the Economy, Volume 24, pages 153-180, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Lauren E. Jones & Guangyi Wang & Tansel Yilmazer, 2022. "The long‐term effect of the Earned Income Tax Credit on women's physical and mental health," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 31(6), pages 1067-1102, June.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Neumark, David & Shirley, Peter, 2020. "The Long-Run Effects of the Earned Income Tax Credit on Women's Labor Market Outcomes," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 66(C).
    2. Maria Donovan Fitzpatrick, 2010. "Preschoolers Enrolled and Mothers at Work? The Effects of Universal Prekindergarten," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 28(1), pages 51-85, January.
    3. Courtemanche, Charles & Tchernis, Rusty & Zhou, Xilin, 2017. "Parental Work Hours and Childhood Obesity: Evidence Using Instrumental Variables Related to Sibling School Eligibility," IZA Discussion Papers 10739, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    4. Charles Gottlieb & Maren Froemel, 2015. "General Equilibrium Effects of Targeted Transfers: The case of EITC," 2015 Meeting Papers 1264, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    5. Otto Lenhart, 2021. "Earned income tax credit and crime," Contemporary Economic Policy, Western Economic Association International, vol. 39(3), pages 589-607, July.
    6. Gunter, Samara, 2013. "State Earned Income Tax Credits and Participation in Regular and Informal Work," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 66(1), pages 33-62, March.
    7. Marianne Simonsen, 2010. "Price of High‐quality Daycare and Female Employment," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 112(3), pages 570-594, September.
    8. Lefebvre, Pierre & Merrigan, Philip & Verstraete, Matthieu, 2009. "Dynamic labour supply effects of childcare subsidies: Evidence from a Canadian natural experiment on low-fee universal child care," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 16(5), pages 490-502, October.
    9. Erdal Tekin, 2004. "Single Mothers Working at Night: Standard Work, Child Care Subsidies, and Implications for Welfare Reform," NBER Working Papers 10274, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    10. Cuong Viet Nguyen, 2022. "The effect of preschool attendance on Children's health: Evidence from a lower middle‐income country," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 31(8), pages 1558-1589, August.
    11. Chari, A.V. & Valli, Elsa, 2021. "The effect of subsidized childcare on the supply of informal care: Evidence from public kindergarten provision in the US," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 77(C).
    12. Villena, Mauricio G. & Sanchez, Rafael & Rojas, Eugenio, 2011. "Unintended Consequences of Childcare Regulation in Chile: Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design," MPRA Paper 62096, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 10 Feb 2015.
    13. Christina Gathmann & Björn Sass, 2012. "Taxing Childcare: Effects on Family Labor Supply and Children," CESifo Working Paper Series 3776, CESifo.
    14. Julio Cáceres-Delpiano & Eugenio Giolito, 2023. "Minimum age requirements and the role of the school choice set," SERIEs: Journal of the Spanish Economic Association, Springer;Spanish Economic Association, vol. 14(1), pages 63-103, March.
    15. Anna Lovasz & Agnes Szabo-Morvai, 2013. "Does Childcare Matter for Maternal Labor Supply? Pushing the limits of the Regression Discontinuity Framework," Budapest Working Papers on the Labour Market 1313, Institute of Economics, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies.
    16. Rietveld, Cornelius A. & Webbink, Dinand, 2016. "On the genetic bias of the quarter of birth instrument," Economics & Human Biology, Elsevier, vol. 21(C), pages 137-146.
    17. Helmut Mahringer & Christine Zulehner, 2015. "Child-care costs and mothers’ employment rates: an empirical analysis for Austria," Review of Economics of the Household, Springer, vol. 13(4), pages 837-870, December.
    18. Florian Buhlmann & Benjamin Elsner & Andreas Peichl, 2018. "Tax refunds and income manipulation: evidence from the EITC," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 25(6), pages 1490-1518, December.
    19. Warren Miller & Jo Jones & David Pasta, 2016. "An implicit ambivalence-indifference dimension of childbearing desires in the National Survey of Family Growth," Demographic Research, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany, vol. 34(7), pages 203-242.
    20. Lisette Swart & Wiljan van den Berge & Karen van der Wiel, 2019. "Do parents work more when children start school? Evidence from the Netherlands," CPB Discussion Paper 392, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Wage returns to experience; Welfare reform; Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996; Single mothers; Low-skill labor; Current Population Survey; Synthetic cohorts;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J31 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials
    • I38 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - Government Programs; Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs
    • J12 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Marriage; Marital Dissolution; Family Structure
    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:upj:weupjo:16-255. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    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 CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc 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 RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/upjohus.html .

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.