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Title: Essays in the Economics of Gender
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Shen, Jenny |
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Essays in the Economics of Gender Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, Princeton University, 2020 Cohort(s): NLSY79, Young Women Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT) Keyword(s): British Household Panel Survey (BHPS); Expectations/Intentions; Human Capital; Maternal Employment; Motherhood; Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. Chapter 3, co-authored with Ilyana Kuziemko, Jessica Pan, and Ebonya Washington, examines the empirical puzzle of why women's labor force participation rates have stalled, despite women's increasing investment in human capital. We propose a hypothesis to reconcile these two trends: that when they are making key human capital decisions, women in modern cohorts underestimate the impact of motherhood on their future labor supply. Using an event-study framework, we show substantial and persistent employment effects of motherhood in U.K. and U.S. data. We then provide evidence that women do not anticipate these effects. Upon becoming parents, women (and especially more educated women) adopt more negative views toward female employment (e.g., they are more likely to say that women working hurts family life), suggesting that motherhood serves as an information shock to their beliefs. We then look at longer horizons--are young women's expectations about future labor supply correct when they make their key educational decisions? In fact, female high school seniors are increasingly and substantially overestimating the likelihood they will be in the labor market in their thirties, a sharp reversal from previous cohorts who substantially underestimated their future labor supply. |
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Bibliography Citation
Shen, Jenny. Essays in the Economics of Gender. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, Princeton University, 2020. |