Nabanita Datta Gupta

Gender Matching And Competitiveness: Experimental Evidence

This paper experimentally investigates if and how peoples competitiveness depends on their own gender and on the gender of people with whom they interact. Participants are given information about the gender of the co-participant they are matched with, they then choose between a tournament or a piece rate payment scheme, and finally perform a real task. As already observed in the literature, we find that significantly more men than women choose the tournament. The gender of the co-participant directly influences mens choices (men compete less against other men than against women), but only when the gender information is made sufficiently salient. A higher predicted competitiveness of women induces more competition. Giving stronger tournament incentives, or allowing the participants to choose the gender of their co-participant, increases womens willingness to compete, but does not close the gender gap in competitiveness.

Male and Female Competitive Behavior: Experimental Evidence

Male and female choices differ in many economic situations, e.g., on the labor market. This paper considers whether such differences are driven by different attitudes towards competition. In our experiment subjects choose between a tournament and a piece-rate pay scheme before performing a real task. Men choose the tournament significantly more often than women. Women are mainly influenced by their degree of risk aversion, but men are not. Men compete more against men than against women, but compete against women who are thought to compete. The behavior of men seems primarily to be influenced by social norms whose nature and origin we discuss.

Swimming Upstream, Floating Downstream: Comparing Women's Relative Wage Progress in the United States and Denmark

Applying a new decomposition method to U.S. PSID and Danish Longitudinal Sample data, the authors compare how U.S. and Danish gender wage gaps developed between 1983 and 1995. In Denmark, they find, the wage gap widened, because the worsening in womens relative returns to observable human capital attributes, as well as in their ranking relative to men in unobservable productive attributes, more than offset their wage gains from improved observable qualifications relative to mens. In the United States, in contrast, the gender convergence in qualifications offset adverse influences, including increasing wage dispersion throughout the labor market, to result in a narrowing of the gap. The largest increase in the gap in Denmark was experienced by women in the top earnings decile, and the largest decline in the gap in the United States affected those at the top and in the middle of the distribution.

The Impact of Worker and Establishment-Level Characteristics on Male-Female Wage Differentials: Evidence from Danish Matched Employee-Employer Data

This paper examines how the segregation of women into certain occupations, industries, establishments, and job cells impacts the gender wage differential of full-time, private sector workers in Denmark. We use matched employer and employee data that contain labor market information for the Danish population. This enables us to document, for the first time, the wage impacts of gender segregation at the level of establishment and job cell in Denmark. We estimate the wage effects of gender segregation at the above four levels through fixed effects or through controls for the proportion of females within the four structures. We find that occupation has a much larger role than industri or establishment in accounting for the gender gap in full-time private sector wages in Denmark. In addition, men and women earn different wages within job cells.

Timing and Flexibility of Housework and Men and Women's Wages

This paper analyses the effect of housework on men and women’s wages in Denmark by estimating quantile regressions on Danish time use survey data from 1987, merged to register information on hourly wages and other labour market variables for each of the years 1987-1991. We find, as in U.S. studies, that housework has negative effects on the wages of women and positive effects on the wages of men, except at the high end of the conditional wage distribution. At the 90th quantile, housework has a positive effect on the wages of women and a negative effect on the wages of men, and in fact, high-wage men receive the largest wage penalty of doing housework. Timing and flexibility of housework turn out to be more important than the level of housework, and women, particularly at the high end of the conditional wage distribution, who time their housework immediately before or after market work or engage in home tasks that require contiguous blocks of time are significantly penalized in terms of lower wages. These findings are even stronger for married and cohabiting couples and for workers on fixed time schedules as opposed to workers with flexible time schedules which are part of a bargain with the employer.

Overeducation among immigrants in Sweden: incidence, wage effects and state dependence

The utilization and reward of the human capital of immigrants in the labor market of the host country has been studied extensively. Using Swedish register data from 2001–2008, we extend the immigrant educational mismatch literature by analyzing incidence, wage effects and state dependence in overeducation among natives and immigrants. In line with previous research we find a higher incidence and a lower return to overeducation among immigrants indicating that immigrants lose more from being overeducated. We find a high degree of state dependence in overeducation both among natives and immigrants, but considerably higher among immigrants.JEL codesJ61, I21, J24, J31, F22

The impact of health on individual retirement plans: self-reported versus diagnostic measures.

We reassess the impact of health on retirement plans of older workers using a unique survey-register match-up which allows comparing the retirement effects of potentially biased survey self-reports of health to those of unbiased register-based diagnostic measures. The aim is to investigate whether even for narrowly defined health measures a divergence exists in the impacts of health on retirement between self-reported health and objective physician-reported health. Our sample consists of older workers and retirees drawn from a Danish panel survey from 1997 and 2002, merged to longitudinal register data. Estimation of measurement error-reduced and selection-corrected pooled OLS and fixed effects models of retirement show that receiving a medical diagnosis is an important determinant of retirement planning for both men and women, in fact more important than economic factors. The type of diagnosis matters, however. For men, the largest reduction in planned retirement age occurs for a diagnosis of lung disease while for women it occurs for musculo-skeletal disease. Except for cardiovascular disease, diagnosed disease is more influential in mens retirement planning than in womens. Our study provides evidence that mens self-report of myalgia and back problems and womens self-report of osteoarthritis possibly yield biased estimates of the impact on planned retirement age, and that this bias ranges between 1.5 and 2 years, suggesting that users of survey data should be wary of applying self-reports of health conditions with diffuse symptoms to the study of labor market outcomes. On the other hand, self-reported cardiovascular disease such as high blood pressure does not appear to bias the estimated impact on planned retirement.

The effect of low birth weight on height, weight and behavioral outcomes in the medium-run

A number of studies have documented negative long term effects of low birth weight. Yet, not much is known about the dynamics of the process leading to adverse health and educational outcomes in the long run. While previous studies focusing mainly on LBW effects on physical growth and cognitive outcomes have found effects of the same size at both school age and young adulthood, others have found a diminishing negative effect over time. The purpose of this paper was to bring new evidence to this issue by analyzing the medium run effects of low birth weight on child behavioral outcomes as well as physical growth at ages 6 months, 3, 7 and 11 years using data from the Danish Longitudinal Survey of Children. Observing the same children at different points in time enabled us to chart the evolution of anthropometric and behavioral deficits among children born with low birth weight and helped understanding the nature and timing of interventions.

Wage Dispersion, Public Sector Wages and the Stagnating Danish Gender Wage Gap

The Gender wage gap in Denmark has virtually stagnated since the early 1970s. This study examines whether this stagnation is mainly due to a changing wage dispersion or to changing prices on observed and unobserved skills. Since about half of the female labour force is employed in the public sector, the impact of the changing wage structure between the public and private sectors is investigated. The analysis is based on the Juhn-Murphy-Pierce decomposition applied to a pooled wage regression model. The equivalence between the former and the Oaxaca-Ransom generalized wage decomposition is established. These techniques are applied to a sample of Danish wage earners in the period 1983-94. The decomposition results suggest different explanations bethind the stagnation of the gender wage gap in the public and private sectors. The development in average public sector wages is calculated assuming observed and unobserved private sector prices are in effect.

Do workers underreport morbidity? The accuracy of self-reports of chronic conditions

We use matched Danish health survey and register data to investigate discrepancies between register-based diagnoses and self-reported morbidity. We hypothesize that false negatives (medical diagnoses existing in the register but not reported in the survey) arise partly because individuals fear career repercussions of being discovered suffering a chronic or severe illness that potentially lowers productivity. We find evidence of substantial underreporting, which is indeed systematically higher for individuals in the labor market.