Scheduled to appear as Chapter 7 in "Labor and Employment Law and Economics", a volume in Edward Elgar’s second edition of the Encyclopedia of Law and Economics

Latin American countries are generally characterized as displaying high income and earnings inequality overall along with high inequality by gender, race, and ethnicity. However, the latter phenomenon is not a major contributor to the former phenomenon. Using household survey data from four...

This report examines male gender issues and their potential negative impact on male development. It finds that HIV/AIDS, substance abuse, occupational injury, violence, and incarceration and other forms of institutionalization is proportionately affect men. Moreover, changing work patterns have...

Decisions about childbearing and market work are significantly interrelated. Although there are many estimates of the effects of fertility on labor supply, few of them have adequately addressed the problems of simultaneity inherent in these choices. In our research we use exogenous variations in...

Paper Prepared for the International Conference for Promoting Equal Employment Opportunity for Women. April 23, 2008

A customary gender division of labor is one in which women and men are directed towards certain tasks and/or explicitly prohibited from performing others. We offer an explanation as to why the gender division of labor is so often enforced by custom, and why customary gender divisions of labor...

This paper gives an overview of the current (and recent past) status of women economists in the United States and describes what American economists have done to promote gender equality in the economics profession. Initiatives include in large part what the American Economic Association, through...

In pre-modern societies the residence of a newly-wedded couple is often decided by custom. We formulate a theory of optimal post-marital residence rules based on contracting problems created by the nature of pre-marriage human capital investments. We argue that a fixed post-marital residence...

The “tipping” phenomenon, whereby an occupation switches from dominance by one demographic group to dominance by another, has occurred in various occupations. Multiple causes have been suggested for such switches, including several related to technological change, both through effects on the...

In The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray (1994) claim, based on evidence from cross-sectional regressions, that differences in wages in the U.S. labor market are predominantly explained by general intelligence. Cawley, Heckman, and Vytlacil (1999), using evidence from random effects panel...