Joni Hersch

Education Match and Job Match

Using a new data set, this paper gives evidence in support of the intuitive notion that overqualified workers are less satisfied with their jobs and are more likely to quit. However, training time is inversely related to overqualification, which suggests why such seeming mismatches occur and may in fact be optimal. Copyright 1991 by MIT Press.

Housework, Fixed Effects, and Wages of Married Workers

Although the primacy of household responsibilities in determining gender differences in labor market outcomes is universally recognized, there has been little investigation of the direct effect of housework on wages. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, cross-sectional wage regressions reveal a substantial negative relation between wages and housework for wives, which persists in specifications controlling for individual fixed effects. The evidence for husbands is inconclusive. Married womens housework time is, on average, three times that of married mens. The addition of housework time to the wage equations increases the explained component of the gender wage gap from 27-30 percent to 38 percent.

Household Specialization And The Male Marriage Wage Premium

Empirical research has consistently shown that married men have substantially higher wages, on average, than otherwise similar unmarried men. One commonly cited hypothesis to explain this pattern is that marriage allows one spouse to specialize in market production and the other to specialize in home production, enabling the former—usually the husband—to acquire more market-specific human capital and, ultimately, earn higher wages. The authors test this hypothesis using panel data from the National Survey of Families and Households. The data reveal that married men spent virtually the same amount of time on home production as did single men, albeit on different types of housework. Estimates from a fixed effects wage equation indicate that the male marriage wage premium is not substantially affected by controls for home production activities. Household specialization, the authors conclude, does not appear to have been responsible for the marriage premium in this sample.

Smoking, seat belts, and other risky consumer decisions: Differences by gender and race

Using data from a large national survey, this paper documents substantial differences by gender and race in smoking behavior, seat belt use, preventative dental care measured by teeth brushing and flossing, exercise, and whether the individual checks his or her blood pressure. White women are the most protective of their health, while black males are the least likely to take health-enhancing actions. However, the racial gap in safety behavior narrows considerably or reverses after controlling for demographic, human capital, and labor market characteristics that affect safety choices. On the other hand, the safety gap by gender increases after controlling for characteristics.

Cigarette Smoking, Seatbelt Use, and Differences in Wage-Risk Tradeoffs

Using an original data set that allowed us to measure the job risk perceived by individuals as well as smoking and seatbelt use, we found that cigarette smokers and nonseatbelt wearers receive a lower compensating differential for risk than nonsmokers and seatbelt wearers. While workers on average have an implicit value of a nonfatal lost workday injury of

Male-Female Differences in Hourly Wages: The Role of Human Capital, Working Conditions, and Housework

48,000, this value is

Housework and Wages

81,000 for nonsmoking workers who wear seatbelts, with no evidence of a positive valuation for workers who smoke and do not wear a seatbelt. Our results imply that individual differences in other health-related activities are influential determinants of the observed wage-risk tradeoff. We also found significant compensating differentials for several nonrisk job attributes.

Profiling the New Immigrant Worker: The Effects of Skin Color and Height

This study uses a new data set from a 1986 survey of workers to examine simultaneously the wage effects of human capital, household responsibilities, working conditions, and on-the-job training. The analysis suggests that household responsibilities had a negative effect on womens earnings, but the unexplained difference between the earnings of men and women is not greatly reduced by inclusion in the explanatory model of information on either housework or working conditions. The presence of children appears to have had a positive effect on the wages of both men and women.

Is Union Job Dissatisfaction Real

Gender differences in labor market outcomes are often attributed to gender differences in household responsibilities, and substantial empirical evidence documents the direct negative impact of housework time on wages, particularly for married women. Using data from the National Survey of Families and Households, we find that housework has a negative effect on wages regardless of marital status. Furthermore, this relation is strongest for housework tasks such as cooking and cleaning that constitute a daily routine. Because women spend substantially more time on housework, controlling for housework time increases the explained component of the gender wage gap by 14 percentage points.

Skin Tone Effects Among African Americans: Perceptions and Reality

Using data from the New Immigrant Survey 2003, this article shows that skin color and height affect wages among new lawful immigrants to the United States, controlling for education, English language proficiency, occupation in source country, family background, ethnicity, race, and country of birth. Immigrants with the lightest skin color earn on average 17% more than comparable immigrants with the darkest skin color. Taller immigrants have higher wages, but weight does not affect wages. Controls for extensive current labor market characteristics that may be influenced by discrimination do not eliminate the negative effect of darker skin color on wages.