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Title: Essays in Labor Economics
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Gormly, Sarah Anne
Essays in Labor Economics
Ph.D. Dissertation, Georgetown University, 2002. DAI-A 63/11, p. 4036, May 2003
Cohort(s): Young Women
Publisher: UMI - University Microfilms, Bell and Howell Information and Learning
Keyword(s): Children, School-Age; Gender Differences; Labor Economics; Labor Force Participation; Labor Market Demographics; Modeling; Modeling, Probit; Part-Time Work; Wage Equations; Work Hours/Schedule; Work Reentry

The first part of this dissertation fits into the literature on women's labor market participation. Female workers are observed to interrupt their careers and use part-time hour employment; and these work patterns may impact wages. Workers are often penalized for interruptions in the form of lower re-entry wages, and part-time work is often less paid than full-time work. Past studies suggest that workers who interrupt work experience a period of elevated returns to experience, reducing the effect of non-work spells on earnings. My goal is to learn if this period occurs for workers who re-enter work at part-time hours and for those who re-enter work at full-time hours. I use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Women and estimate a modified Mincer wage equation in which I control for all spells of full-time and part-time work, and non-work spells. I find a rebound period for workers who re-enter work at full-time hours and for those who re-enter at part-time hours, and for full-time re-entrants, some evidence that this is due to higher rates of return to general human capital in the post-interruption period. I compare estimation results for a related wage specification obtained for my dataset to those obtained for Leslie Stratton's 1995 dataset, which contains of more experienced workers than mine, and learn that the results for my sample are not likely to apply to female workers in general. I conclude that less experienced workers use employment and non-work differently than more experienced workers. The second topic is a collaboration with Kenneth Swinnerton. We consider the relationship between adult labor market conditions and the probability that school aged individuals are enrolled in school. We use data from the South Africa Integrated Household Survey to estimate the returns to schooling in each South African province, and include the estimated returns to schooling as an explanatory variable in a probit model for school enrollment. We find variation in local rates of return on schooling and a positive relationship between returns to schooling and the probability of enrollment.
Bibliography Citation
Gormly, Sarah Anne. Essays in Labor Economics. Ph.D. Dissertation, Georgetown University, 2002. DAI-A 63/11, p. 4036, May 2003.