Wednesday 1 December 2021
- Speaker: Oksana Leukhina, Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis
- Time: 14:45-15:45 GMT
- Title: Gender Gap (joint work with Gulliaume Vandenbroucke)
We employ the Ben-Porath (1967) human capital model to study the evolution of the gender wage gap over the long run and consider the effect of changing lifecycle profiles of female market hours. In so doing, we find that the implied response in unobserved investment in human capital accumulation accounts for most of the long run gender wage gap dynamics.
This finding is consistent with the labour economists’ view that changing selection on unobservables played a critical role in the gender wage gap dynamics. Our contribution is to make explicit and quantify the link between market hours and (unobserved) investment in human capital.
Wednesday 8 December 2021
- Speaker: Guilhem Cassan, University of Namur
- Time: 14:45-15:45 GMT
- Title: Stopping Rule and Sex Selective Abortion: New Measures and World Evidence (joint with Jean Maria Baland and Francois Woitrin)
When parents want a specific number of children of a given gender (boys, in general), they can use two methods: the "stopping rule" and sex selective abortion. In societies in which gender preferences are prevalent, these methods can heavily affect fertility practices.
We propose two novel theory based measures of detection of these practices. Taking the perspective of the child rather than that of the family, these measures are easily implementable, precise, and rely on fewer assumptions than other measures in use.
We then propose a new method to detect the prevalence of sex selective abortion in a given society and implement it at the world level.