Sister competition and birth order effects among marriage-aged girls: Evidence from a field experiment in rural Bangladesh
By Stephanie Zhong
Early marriage before the age of 18 is prevalent among adolescent girls in Bangladesh, but the timing of marriage is not uniform across daughters within a household, with some sisters marrying earlier than others. Using survey data from a novel field experiment from rural Bangladesh, I find that girls ages 10-21 with lower birth order tend to be married at a younger age, even when controlling for confounding nature of household size on birth order. Additionally, girls with younger sisters are more likely to be married and at a younger age than girls with younger brothers. The findings on dowry are inclusive.
Advisors: Erica Field, Michelle Connolly | JEL Codes: D13, J13, O15
Incentives to Quit in Men’s Professional Tennis: An Empirical Test of Tournament Theory
By Will Walker
This paper studies the influence of incentives on quitting behaviors in professional men’s tennis tournaments and offers broader implications to pay structures in the labor market. Precedent literature established that prize incentives and skill heterogeneity can impact player effort exertion. Prize incentives include prize money and indirect financial rewards (ranking points). Players may also exert less effort when there is a significant difference in skill between the match favorite and the match underdog. Results warrant three important conclusions. First, prize incentives (particularly prize money) do influence a player’s likelihood of quitting. Results on skill heterogeneity are less conclusive, though being the “match favorite” could reduce the odds of quitting. Finally, match underdogs and “unseeded” players may be especially susceptible to the influence of prize incentives when considering whether to quit.
Advisors: Peter Arcidiacono and Grace Kim | JEL Codes: J41, J31, J32, J33, M12, M51, M52
Endogeneity in the Decision to Migrate: Changes in the Self-Selection of Puerto Rican Migrants before, during, and after the Great Recession
By Aasha Reddy
Migrants self-select on characteristics such as income. We use the U.S. Census’ ACS and PRCS to study changes in selection patterns of Puerto Rican migrants to the to the U.S. mainland (50 states) before, during, and after the Great Recession (2005 to 2016). We construct counterfactual income densities to compare incomes of Puerto Rican migrants to the mainland versus incomes of island residents under equivalent returns to skill. We examine where Puerto Rican migrants to the mainland tend to fall in the island’s income distribution and find that Puerto Rican migrants tend to come from the top 20% of the island’s income distribution. This pattern remained stable with little to no effect of the Great Recession on selectivity patterns.
Advisors: William Darity and Michelle Connolly | JEL Codes: J15, J61, O15
The Effects of Parental Division of Employment on Child Outcomes During Adulthood
By Meredith Parenti
This paper offers an empirical analysis of the effects of division of employment between parent figures on future outcomes of children. Using propensity score matching, this study extends upon previous research to offer an understanding of the joint role played by maternal employment and that of a present or non-present husband. Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Young Adults and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 are used to create and examine a comprehensive set of respondents’ backgrounds and labor outcomes. Relative to children from two parent homes with only working fathers, children from two parent homes with part-time working mothers and non-working fathers appear to have less positive labor outcomes. Conversely, children with full-time working mothers without spouses in the home have more positive labor outcomes. These findings demonstrate the mediation of each parent figure on the role of the other in determining outcomes and suggest maternal work is beneficial to children, or plays no significant role, unless a mother has to support not only her children, but also her husband through her employment.
Advisors: V. Joseph Hotz and Michelle Connolly | JEL Codes: J01, J12, J22
Measuring the Long-term Effects of Orphanhood
By Nicholas Thomas Gardner
This paper works towards developing the narrative of orphans whose parent or parents died from natural disaster. By taking advantage of the unanticipated nature of death from the 2004
Indonesian tsunami, orphanhood can be treated as much closer to random than similar literature using data centered on HIV/AIDS related deaths. We use a community level fixed effects model to attempt to derive a causal relationship between orphanhood and both education and log wages. Our models suggest that orphaned males aged 14 and older at baseline complete 1-2 fewer years of education than their cohorts. The adverse effects persist in the long-term, as these orphans earn 26% less than non-orphan cohorts.
Advisors: Duncan Thomas and Kent Kimbrough | JEL Codes: I24, I25, I31, J24, J31
24K Magic: Evidence on Maternal Asset Ownership and Children’s Long Term Outcomes in Indonesia
By Maya Durvasula
Household resource allocation in response to economic shocks is of central importance for policy makers, especially given widely documented evidence of gender biases. In this paper, I exploit a
plausibly exogenous shock to maternal asset holdings in Indonesia to examine gender biases in resource allocation in the wake of the 1998 East Asian Financial Crisis. Using insights from
anthropology, I separate assets in the hands of women from those controlled by men and interpret findings in the context of a household decision-making framework that allows preferences of parents to differ. Taking household-specific heterogeneity into account with fixed effects, I find significant evidence of efforts to shield male children from the effects of the crisis in both contemporaneous educational attainment and longer-term labor market outcomes, a remarkable trend given minimal evidence of a pro-son bias in Indonesia prior to the crisis. Finally, inferring preferences from maternal resource allocation, I find suggestive evidence of an old age security motive in women’s investment decisions.
Advisor: Duncan Thomas | JEL Codes: D13, I0, J13, J16
The Effects of Religion and Patriarchal Norms on Female Labor Force Participation
by Chidinma Hannah Nnoromele
Abstract
This paper provides an empirical study of the influence of religion, religiosity, and patriarchal norms on female labor force participation across 40 countries. Using micro-level data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) 2012: “Family and Changing Gender Roles IV and macro-level data from World Bank Group’s Women, Business, and the Law 2012 database, the study examines religious and patriarchal aspects that influence female labor force participation among working women, ages 15 to 64. The analysis supports the hypothesis that more religious and socially conservative women are less likely to have paid work. However, the analysis, which examines ten different religions, finds that the specific religion a woman practices, excluding the cultural religions (Judaism and Hinduism), does not influence female labor force participation when controlling for national and environmental cultural factors. This suggests that a country’s institutions, socio-political context, and geographic cultural heritage matter in the way that religiosity is expressed in women’s economic participation.
Professor Michael Munger, Faculty Advisor
Professor Michelle Connolly, Faculty Advisor
JEL Codes: J1, D19, J21, J22
Team Payroll Versus Performance in Professional Sports: Is Increased Spending Associated with Greater Success?
by Grant Shorin
Abstract
Professional sports are a billion-dollar industry, with player salaries accounting for the largest expenditure. Comparing results between the four major North American leagues (MLB, NBA, NHL, and NFL) and examining data from 1995 through 2015, this paper seeks to answer the following question: do teams that have higher payrolls achieve greater success, as measured by their regular season, postseason, and financial performance? Multiple data visualizations highlight unique relationships across the three dimensions and between each sport, while subsequent empirical analysis supports these findings. After standardizing payroll values and using a fixed effects model to control for team-specific factors, this paper finds that higher payroll spending is associated with an increase in regular season winning percentage in all sports (but is less meaningful in the NFL), a substantial rise in the likelihood of winning the championship in the NBA and NHL, and a lower operating income in all sports.
Professor Peter Arcidiacono, Faculty Advisor
Professor Kent Kimbrough, Faculty Advisor
JEL Codes: Z2, Z20, Z23, J3
The Decision to Marry of Cohabit and Economic Crises
By Jennifer Garand
This paper aims to investigate the relationship between peoples’ decisions to marry or cohabit and their economic circumstances – both personal, as measured by their employment status, and peripheral, as measured by the unemployment rate in their local county. This paper will look at the role economic factors, as well as demographic and personal factors, play in the decision of whether or not to marry, cohabit, or stay single.
Advisor: Marjorie McElroy, Michelle Connolly | JEL Codes: D1, J12, J16 | Tagged: Marriage, Unemployment, Demographics, Cohabitation
Tying the Knot: Links Between the Labor and Marriage Markets
By Shafiq Haris, Alexander Prezioso, Michael Temple, Logan Turner, Kevin Zipf, Elizabeth Di Giulio, and Joseph Ueland
This paper analyzes the impact of exogenous shifts in the labor market on the marriage market. The relationship between these two markets is complicated by their reverse causality. That is to say, labor market decisions play into marriage market decisions, and vice versa. In order to mitigate this simultaneous determination, this paper adopts and furthers a methodology utilized by Autor, Dorn and Hansen (2015). Henceforth referred to as ADH, the authors analyze the effects of trade on local labor markets between 1980 and 2007. All 722 commuting zones in the continental United States were evaluated with respect to their level of exposure to increasing competition from Chinese imports, and the share of jobs within the commuting zone considered “routine,” and thus susceptible to computerization and/or mechanization. The authors analyze the impact of these independent variables on labor force participation. This paper takes Autor, et al’s analysis one step further by using the routinization and trade variables as instruments through which we can observe the exogenous impact of the labor market on marital status shares. This paper progresses through two specifications before ultimately utilizing a Two–Stage Least Squares analysis with Autor et al’s instruments to isolate the impact of decadal changes in the labor market on decadal changes in male and female marital status shares. Analysis is performed on different age groups, as both the marriage and labor market are different for people of different ages. The first specification applies Autor, et. al’s right–hand side with marital status shares as dependent variables. The second specification adds labor market ratios, which relate male and female labor market status. The previously mentioned final specification offers easily interpreted results and is the most encompassing model. Overall, we find that the labor market affects the marriage market much like the current literature would suggest. For example, as male employment increases, the share of females never married decreases and the share of females married increases. This relationship is consistent with existing marriage market theory. However, the results suggest that the literature does not hold in the oldest age group in the data, as power dynamics in the marriage market shift. Our methodology and findings are unique, as we explore this field through a new lens. Future research can expand upon this by incorporating a dataset with information regarding cohabitation habits and consistent longitudinal variable measurements for controls.
Advisor: Marjorie McElroy | JEL Codes: J1, J12, J21 | Tagged: Employment, Marriage
