Essays in labor and family economics.

Abstract

The papers in this dissertation deal broadly with issues related to inequality, human capital formation, and family economics. The first paper investigates the role of selection bias in the change in the black-white log wage gap among women. The second paper looks at the effect on child academic achievement of maternal human capital investment undertaken during the child's lifetime. The third paper is a cohort-based investigation of the gender wage gap over the past two decades. The first chapter seeks to estimate changes in selection bias in the observed wages of black and white women over time. Results suggest that while the selection-corrected wage gap is larger than the observed gap throughout the period under study, selection bias became much less important in recent years. Moreover, my results indicate that focusing on the measured wage gap leads to misleading conclusions with regard to the relative economic progress of black women. The pattern of potential wage gaps suggests that the racial gap in economic opportunity among women was never as small as it appeared, and changed less over time than suggested by observed estimates. The second chapter investigates the role that maternal schooling undertaken during a child's lifetime plays in child cognitive development. Little research has focused on the effects of human capital investments undertaken by women <italic> while</italic> they are mothering children. A theoretical model is developed that shows that such maternal schooling has an ambiguous effect on child cognitive development. Empirical results suggest that maternal schooling undertaken during the first year of the child's life has large negative significant effects on child cognitive development, but that schooling in later years has positive significant effects on child cognitive development. The final chapter uses cohort analysis to investigate the stagnation of the gender wage gap during the 1990s. We find that understanding cohort dynamics is crucial to understanding changes in the wage gap. In particular, changes in point in lifecycle cohort replacement explain much of the increases in women's wages related to changes in observed characteristics and to changes in selection into employment.