Paul Taubman

Birth Order, Schooling, and Earnings

Birth-order effects are posited by many to affect earnings and schooling. We show how such effects can be interpreted to shift either the earnings possibility frontier for siblings or parental preferences. We find empirical evidence for birth-order effects on (age-adjusted) schooling and on earnings for young U.S. adults, though the latter is not robust for all specifications. The examination of intrahousehold allocations suggests that these birth-order differences occur despite parental preferences or prices by birth order favoring later borns, apparently because of stronger endowment effects that favor firstborns.

College Choice and Wages: Estimates Using Data on Female Twins

The authors assess the impact of college quality on womens earnings and the influence of family and individual endowments on college choice using new data from a survey of identical and nonidentical twins born in Minnesota. The estimates reject models that ignore school choice. The statistically preferred estimates suggest that Ph.D.-granting, private universities with well-paid senior faculty and smaller enrollments produce students who have significantly higher earnings later in life. Both the quantity of schooling and the quality of schooling resources are allocated to higher-endowed individuals, which exacerbates preexisting inequality in human capital and biases conventional estimates of school quality effects. Copyright 1996 by MIT Press.

Higher Education, Mental Ability, and Screening

Using regression analysis we find that mental ability, education, and background factors are important determinants of earnings at several points in the individuals life cycle. Real social rates of return to education based on this analysis range from 11 percent for those with some college to about 2 percent for those with a Ph.D., while private rates are slightly higher. Rates of return to an undergraduate degree are about 8 percent. We conclude that these returns reflect, in part, the use of education as a relatively inexpensive screening device by employers, and without screening the private returns might be up to 50 percent below those mentioned above.

Chapter 21 Segmented labor markets

The segmented labor market (SLM) approach is typically identified with a group of economists who argue that the neoclassical apparatus provides an inadequate or incomplete description of the labor market and leaves unexplained most of the major labor market policy issues. The SLM literature ranges over a broad spectrum of viewpoints sharing a common hypothesis that labor markets are segmented and that problems of income distribution, unemployment, and discrimination are a result of that segmentation. Some models and research that carry the SLM label are clearly different from neoclassical research. A distinctive feature of SLM research is that it is primarily motivated by concern over policy issues. The chapter describes the SLM model of the internal labor market of the primary sector of the economy and the SLM model of the secondary or low wage sector of the economy. In the chapter, the secondary sector model is analyzed and the findings in the empirical literature that are relevant to the testable hypotheses of the SLM are surveyed.

Is Schooling "Mostly in the Genes"? Nature-N urture Decomposition Using Data on Relatives

We modify R. A. Fishers model by incorporating measures of the environment that may be correlated across kin groups. We estimate a model of schooling attainment using data on eight kin groups and find a large contribution of genetic endowments to the variance in schooling though certain aspects of the environment matter.

Some Economic and Demographic Consequences of Mental Illness

This article uses a unique data set to measure the economic and demographic consequences of mental illness. We find that mental illness significantly reduces an individuals earnings and that in some cases this effect lasts as long as 15 years. Mental illness is also shown to affect an individuals ability to marry or stay married, lowers the number of children that he has, and encourages his wife to work.

Do Parents Favor Boys

In an optimizing model of parental allocation systematic differences in human capital investments betwen the sexes may originate in at least 3 ways. 1) Parents may respond to expected gender wage differentials. 2) Parents may respond to systematic differences by gender in the price of human capital investments. 3) Parental preferences may favor girls or boys in the sense that they value identical outcomes at the same cost more highly for one sex than for the other. This paper analyzes the role of parental preferences in general and unequal concern in particular in the allocation of human capital investments among children. The authors generalize their earlier model of the human capital investments among children to incorporate the possibility that the returns to such investments may include not only the childs own ecpected earnings but also the expected earnings of his or her spouse. Thus the model assumes that parents may value returns that accrue trough the marriage market as well as through education. The relevant returns to education may include marrying a spouse with higher expected earnings. The empirical analysis indicates that gender wage differentials like endowment differentials are mildly reinforced by the parental allocation of human capital investments. Marriage market outcomes are significant determinants of the allocation of human capital investments among children. There is no evidence that parental preferences favor boys; this study shows that parental preferences either exhibit equal concern or slightly favor gils.

Family Resources, Family Size, and Access to Financing for College Education

Unequal access to financing for education may be an important source of educational differences. We develop a model relating sib schooling and earnings similarities to sibship size with and without equal access and estimate it for the education of veterans, for whom the GI Bill assured equal access, and for their children, who had no such government assistance. We find an inverse relationship between sibship size and sib schooling and earnings similarities for the children, but not for the veterans; we conclude that, in the absence of equal access policies, unequal access is an important source of educational differences.

Genetic influences on job satisfaction and work values

Abstract Two replications of the Arvey, Bouchard, Segal and Abraham (1989; Journal of Applied Psychology, 74, 187–192) study were conducted investigating whether there is a significant genetic association with general job satisfaction as well as its facets. A sample of male monozygotic (n = 95) and dizygotic (n = 80) twin pairs reared together completed the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire. As in Arvey et al. (1989), a significant genetic influence was demonstrated for Intrinsic Satisfaction with no support given for genetic influence on Extrinsic Satisfaction. Only modest support was given for a genetic influence on General Satisfaction. A second study using a sample of 1236 monozygotic and 1165 dizygotic twin pairs reared together showed a significant genetic influence on overall job satisfaction to replicate the Arvey et al. (1989) study as well as evidence for the genetic influence on work values to replicate the Keller Bouchard, Arvey, Segal and Dawis (1992) study.

Earnings, education, genetics, and environment.

A major and well-recognized difficulty in estimating the effects of education on earnings is that the more educated are likely to be more able, irrespective of education. If ability also determines earnings and is not controlled, ordinary least squares will yield biased estimates of the education coefficient. In this study, we use data on identical twins to control for differences in ability that arise from genetic endowments and family environment. Not controlling for genetics and family environment may cause a large bias, up to two-thirds of the noncontrolled coefficient.