We use a hypothetical choice methodology to estimate preferences for workplace attributes from a sample of high-ability undergraduates attending a highly selective university.We estimate that women ...on average have a higher willingness to pay (WTP) for jobs with greater work flexibility and job stability, and men have a higher WTP for jobs with higher earnings growth. These job preferences relate to college major choices and to actual job choices reported in a follow-up survey four years after graduation. The gender differences in preferences explain at least a quarter of the early career gender wage gap.
Gender, competitiveness, and career choices Buser, Thomas; Niederle, Muriel; Oosterbeek, Hessel
The Quarterly journal of economics,
08/2014, Letnik:
129, Številka:
3
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Gender differences in competitiveness have been hypothesized as a potential explanation for gender differences in education and labor market outcomes. We examine the predictive power of a standard ...laboratory experimental measure of competitiveness for the later important choice of academic track of secondary school students in the Netherlands. Although boys and girls display similar levels of academic ability, boys choose substantially more prestigious academic tracks, where more prestigious tracks are more math- and science-intensive. Our experimental measure shows that boys are also substantially more competitive than girls. We find that competitiveness is strongly positively correlated with choosing more prestigious academic tracks even conditional on academic ability. Most important, we find that the gender difference in competitiveness accounts for a substantial portion (about 20%) of the gender difference in track choice.
We estimate the effect of primary school teachers' gender biases on boys' and girls' academic achievements during middle and high school and on the choice of advanced level courses in math and ...sciences during high school in Tel-Aviv, Israel. We measure bias using class-gender differences in scores between school exams graded by teachers and national exams graded blindly by external examiners. For identification, we rely on the random assignment of teachers and students to classes in primary schools. Our results suggest that assignment to a teacher with a greater bias in favor of girls (boys) has positive effects on girls' (boys') achievements. Such gender biases have also positive impact on girls' (boys') enrollment in advanced level math courses in high school. These results suggest that teachers' biased behavior at early stages of schooling has long run implications for occupational choices and earnings at adulthood, because enrollment in advanced courses in math and science in high school is a prerequisite for post-secondary schooling in engineering, computer science and so on.
Willingness to compete has been found to predict individual and gender differences in educational choices and labor market outcomes. We provide further evidence for this relationship by linking Swiss ...students' Baccalaureate school (high school) specialization choices to an experimental measure of willingness to compete. Boys are more likely to specialize in math in Baccalaureate school. In line with previous findings, competitive students are more likely to choose a math specialization. Boys are more likely to opt for competition than girls and this gender difference in competitiveness could partially explain why girls are less likely to choose a math-intensive specialization.
The career costs of children Adda, Jérôme; Dustmann, Christian; Stevens, Katrien
Journal of political economy,
04/2017, Letnik:
125, Številka:
2
Journal Article
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We estimate a dynamic life cycle model of labor supply, fertility, and savings, incorporating occupational choices, with specific wage paths and skill atrophy that vary over the career. This allows ...us to understand the trade-off between occupational choice and desired fertility, as well as sorting both into the labor market and across occupations. We quantify the life cycle career costs associated with children, how they decompose into loss of skills during interruptions, lost earnings opportunities, and selection into more child-friendly occupations. We analyze the long-run effects of policies that encourage fertility and show that they are considerably smaller than short-run effects.
Entrepreneurship and income inequality Halvarsson, Daniel; Korpi, Martin; Wennberg, Karl
Journal of economic behavior & organization,
January 2018, 2018-01-00, 2018, Letnik:
145
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•Our models suggest entrepreneurship as having a polarizing effect on inequality.•Self-employment increases bottom-end dispersion, explaining around 30% of variation.•Incorporated self-employed ...contribute to top-end inequality, explaining around 10%.•Evidence suggest overall modest micro-level link to aggregate level developments.
Entrepreneurship research highlights entrepreneurship as a simultaneous source of enhanced income mobility for some but a potential source of poverty for others. Research on inequality has furthered new types of models to decompose and problematize various sources of income inequality, but attention to entrepreneurship as an increasingly prevalent occupational choice in these models remains scant. This paper seeks to bridge these two literatures using regression-based income decomposition among entrepreneurs and paid workers distinguishing between self-employed (SE) and incorporated self-employed (ISE) individuals in Sweden. We find that the proportion of self-employed in the workforce increases income dispersion by way of widening the bottom end of the distribution, whereas the proportion of incorporated self-employed contributes to income dispersion at the top end of the distribution. Implications for research are discussed.
This article contributes to the occupational choice literature pertaining to entrepreneurship by applying the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) to predict entrepreneurial behaviour. Originating from ...social psychology, the TPB posits that intention, a function of behavioural beliefs, is a significant predictor of subsequent behaviour. In spite of an established stream of scholarship explaining the formation of entrepreneurial intentions, empirical research has not yet employed longitudinal data to examine whether the intention to start a business measured at one point of time translates into subsequent entrepreneurial behaviour. This article provides a full test of the TPB in the prediction of business start-up intentions and subsequent behaviour based on two-wave survey data (2006 and 2009) from the working-age population in Finland. The econometric results support the predictions outlined in the TPB: attitude, perceived behavioural control and subjective norms are significant predictors of entrepreneurial intention; and intention and perceived behavioural control are significant predictors of subsequent behaviour. This research thus provides support to the application of the TPB and the concept of behavioural intention to understand the emergence of complex economic behaviour such as entrepreneurship prior to the onset of any observable action.
Abstract
Clustered standard errors, with clusters defined by factors such as geography, are widespread in empirical research in economics and many other disciplines. Formally, clustered standard ...errors adjust for the correlations induced by sampling the outcome variable from a data-generating process with unobserved cluster-level components. However, the standard econometric framework for clustering leaves important questions unanswered: (i) Why do we adjust standard errors for clustering in some ways but not others, for example, by state but not by gender, and in observational studies but not in completely randomized experiments? (ii) Is the clustered variance estimator valid if we observe a large fraction of the clusters in the population? (iii) In what settings does the choice of whether and how to cluster make a difference? We address these and other questions using a novel framework for clustered inference on average treatment effects. In addition to the common sampling component, the new framework incorporates a design component that accounts for the variability induced on the estimator by the treatment assignment mechanism. We show that, when the number of clusters in the sample is a nonnegligible fraction of the number of clusters in the population, conventional clustered standard errors can be severely inflated, and propose new variance estimators that correct for this bias.
This paper reviews and integrates past research on personal values in work organisations, seeking to portray the role personal values play in shaping the choices and behaviour of individuals in work ...settings. We start by addressing the role of values in the occupational choice people make. We then review research on the relationships of personal values to a variety of behaviours at work. We continue with discussing the multiple paths through which managers’ values affect organisations and their members. In the last section, we address the interplay between organisational levels, and discuss the congruency between personal and organisational values and its implications for organisations and their employees. Together, the research reviewed indicates how the broadness and stability of values make them an important predictor of behaviour at various levels of the organisation. We end by discussing directions for future research on values in organisations.
Ex Ante Returns and Occupational Choice Arcidiacono, Peter; Hotz, V. Joseph; Maurel, Arnaud ...
The Journal of political economy,
12/2020, Letnik:
128, Številka:
12
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Using data from Duke University undergraduates, we make three main contributions to the literature. First, we show that data on earnings beliefs and probabilities of choosing particular occupations ...are highly informative of future earnings and occupations. Second, we show how beliefs data can be used to recover ex ante treatment effects and their relationship with individual choices. We find large differences in expected earnings across occupations and provide evidence of sorting on expected gains. Finally, nonpecuniary factors play an important role, with a sizable share of individuals willing to give up substantial amounts of earnings by not choosing their highest-paying occupation.
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