T. Aldrich Finegan

Women in the labor force

Unlike the rate for men, the labor force participation rate for women has increased significantly over the past three decades or so. This trend is expected to continue at least through 2005. Among the reasons for the growing role of women in the labor market are higher levels of educational attainment, improved employment opportunities, changing values in society, and economic pressures and aspirations that require women to assume dual careers as homemakers and family income producers. By the year 2005, it is estimated that women workers will number about 72 million, with more than 63 percent of all women age 16 and over either working or actively looking for work. While traditional occupations such as secretarial and clerical administrative support and professions such as nursing and teaching still predominate, about 4 million women are now in executive, administrative and managerial positions in the private sectors of the economy. As for the types of industry in which women are employed, service industries clearly predominate. Projections suggest that women workers of the future will be older on average, with the fastest growth occurring in the 45-64 age cohort. They will also be a more diverse group as the number of black, Asian and Hispanic women workers grows more rapidly than the number of white non-Hispanic labor force participants.

The minimum wage and the poor: The end of a relationship

The belief that minimum-wage legislation helps the working poor is one reason for its continued popular support. The authors track the household incomes of low-wage workers and find that a radical transformation has occurred in the half century since the passage of the original minimum-wage law. Today most low-wage workers live in households well above the poverty line. Hence, those living in poverty will get only about 11 percent of the gains from the higher minimum-wage increase proposed in the Kennedy-Hawkins Bill. Low-wage workers in families with incomes three or more times the poverty line will get nearly 40 percent. Thus it is not clear that increases in the minimum wage make good policy even if no jobs are lost as a result.

Compulsory schooling legislation and school attendance in turn-of-the century America: A 'natural experiment' approach

Recent research by Joshua Angrist and Alan Krueger has used information on exact dates of birth in the 1960 to 1980 federal censuses to study the impact of compulsory schooling laws on school attendance. This paper modifies their methodology to analyze similar data in the 1900 federal census to measure the impact of turn-of-the-century compulsory schooling laws. Using data on 14-year olds from the 1900 census public use microdata sample we compare attendance rates of children born after January 1, 1900 with those born before, across states with and without compulsory schooling laws. In states that combined school-leaving with child labor laws, we find that compulsion significantly raised attendance rates.

Work Relief and the Labor Force Participation of Married Women in 1940

Economic analysis of the labor supply of married women has long emphasized the impact of the unemployment of husbands—the added worker effect. This article re-examines the magnitude of the added worker effect in the waning years of the Great Depression. Previous studies of the labor supply of married women during this period failed to take account of various institutional features of New Deal work relief programs, which reduced the size of the added worker effect.

Discouraged Workers and Economic Fluctuations

This article examines recent trends and cyclical changes in the number of discouraged workers and other persons outside the labor force who report wanting regular jobs. Both the incidence of discouragement and its sensitivity to labor market conditions vary widely across demographic groups. The number of persons discouraged for job-market reasons has shown marked cyclical swings, but not the number discouraged for personal reasons. The findings illumine one of the social costs of a slack economy and are relevant to the continuing controversy over the classification of discouraged workers as not in the labor force. The author also shows that recent pro-cyclical swings in the size of the labor force are much larger than can be accounted for by the entry and withdrawal of discouraged workers. He suggests that many persons who decide to enter the labor force when unemployment is low are not reported as discouraged workers—or even as wanting jobs—when unemployment is high.

Do Introductory Economics Students Learn More if Their Instructor Has a PH.D.

Using objective and subjective data from the third edition of the Test of Understanding College Economics (TUCE) collected from 117 classes in introductory economics taught at 34 different colleges, this study examines whether students taught by regular faculty with a Ph.D. degree learn more than students taught by regular faculty who have only an M.A. degree. After controlling for other characteristics of instructors, schools, and students, we find no significant association between instructors terminal degree and several objective measures of student learning in introductory macroeconomics classes; students in introductory microeconomics classes taught by Ph.D.-holding instructors learned substantially and significantly less. For neither subject is there a significant net association between instructors degree and student assessments of amount learned or instructor effectiveness. The results suggest that a future shortage of Ph.D. economists would not reduce student learning in introductory economics courses.

Attrition in Economics Ph.D. Programs

Information about 586 individuals who matriculated into 27 economics Ph.D. programs in Fall 2002 is used to estimate first and second year attrition rates. After two years, 26.5 percent of the initial cohort had left, equally divided between the first and second years. Attrition varies widely across individual programs. It is lower among the most highly rated 15 programs, for students with higher verbal and quantitative GRE scores, and for those on a research assistantship. Poor academic performance is the most cited reason for withdrawal. About 15 percent transfer to other economics programs because they are dissatisfied with some aspect of the particular program where they first enrolled.

Are Student Ratings of Teaching Effectiveness Influenced by Instructors' English Language Proficiency?

We use data from norming the third edition of the Test of Understanding College Economics to exam ine whether instructors for whom English is a second language (ESLs) receive lower student ratings of teaching effectiveness in principles of economics courses, holding constant what students learn in the course. The results suggest that student ratings of ESL instructors are, on average, about 0.4 points lower, on a scale of 1.0 to 5.0, than the ratings of native English speaking instructors. Most of this deficit can be attributed to differences in how the two groups of instructors teach their courses and evaluate the knowledge of their students.

Counting Economics Phds: How Many New Graduates Do U.S. Universities Produce?1

This is the first paper that seeks to reconcile the large and persistent differences across data sources in the number of new economics PhDs that U.S. universities produce. During 1997–2006, the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED) reported 11,524 such degrees in all specialties, compared to 10,812 degrees by the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and 8,862 dissertations listed in the Journal of Economic Literature (JEL). The comparable estimates in general economics (GE) were 9,504, 8,534, and 7,856, respectively. Such differences can lead to problematic assessments of the balance between supply and demand in the market for new PhDs. The study finds that the SED picks up the most new economics PhDs, but it also attracts an unknown number of graduates of business schools and interdisciplinary programs. IPEDS has the most detailed classification framework of specialty degrees, but undercounts graduates of larger GE programs and misclassifies some GE programs. The JELs annual lists provide useful information on the content of doctoral research, but suffer from serious under-reporting by economics departments. After adjusting counts, the study estimates that about 9,100 GE degrees were conferred during the survey decade. The paper offers a rule of thumb for estimating adjusted counts in future years. An epilog finds that other social science disciplines have problems counting new doctoral dissertations and making lists of them accessible to researchers.

Reassessing Cyclical Changes in Workers' Labor Market Status: Gross Flows and the Types of Workers Who Determine Them

This analysis, using Current Population Survey data, yields statistically compelling evidence that cyclical variations in gross flows of U.S. workers—that is, variations by business cycle phase in the number of workers transitioning from one labor market state to another each month—were substantially smaller in 1986–2005 than in 1968–86. The authors identify six types of workers who would be expected to contribute to cyclical variations in these flows. Counter-intuitively, one such group consists of individuals whose decisions to enter or exit the labor force are independent of labor market conditions. Estimates suggest that these “noncyclical movers” are an empirically important component of gross flows into the labor force. The authors contend that the presence of noncyclical movers precludes accurate measurement of the contributions of workers whose entry and exit decisions are consciously influenced by labor market conditions.