Human Capital Investment In Women And Men

How are human capital investments allocated between women and men? What are the returns to investments in women's nutrition, health care, education, mobility, and training? In thirteen wide-ranging and innovative empirical analyses, Investment in Women's Human Capital explores the nature of human capital distributions to women and their effect on outcomes within the family. Section I considers the experiences of high-income countries, examining the limitations of industrialization for the advancement of women; returns to secondary education for women; and state control of women's education and labor market productivity through the design of tax systems and the public subsidy of children. The remaining four sections investigate health, education, household structure and labor markets, and measurement issues in low-income countries, including the effect of technological change on transfers of wealth to and from children in India; women's and men's responses to the costs of medical care in Kenya; the effects of birth order and sex on educational attainment in Taiwan; wage returns to schooling in Indonesia and in Cote d'Ivoire; and the increasing prevalence of female-headed households and the correlates of gender differences in wages in Brazil.

Women, Men, and Human Capital Development in the Public Sector: Return on Investments analyzes the gap in wages paid to women and men who work for federal, state, and local governments; factors that contribute to disparities in pay; and organizational strategies for narrowing the gap. The gender gap in wages and status is closing. Changes in public policies and social and organizational changes have facilitated the development of human capital. However, many systemic, sociopsychological, and social barriers still limit women's career advancement in the public sector. American women earn approximately eighty cents for every dollar earned by men. Women hold less than 30 percent of executive positions in the private sector as well as federal, state, and local governments. This study analyzes factors, both legal and illegal, that lead to inequities in the pay and status of men and women. In recent turbulent economic times many organizations have eliminated jobs, facilitated early retirements, and lost employees frustrated by the lack of opportunities for advancement. Proactive organizations prepare for the unexpected by fully developing their human capital. Public policies have been less than effective in closing the wage gap, due in part to American culture and individual women's choices. Women are more likely than men to complete lower levels of education, enter the workforce later in life, and occupy lower-level positions. For these reasons the gender-based wage gap may never close, but, as the author points out, investments in human capital development may facilitate women's career advancement and narrow the gap. The author develops specific strategies for narrowing the wage gap and explores avenues of implementation. Book jacket.

The changes in women and men's work lives have been considerable in recent decades. Yet much of the recent research on gender differences in employment and earnings has been of a more snapshot nature rather than taking a longer comparative look at evolving patterns. In this paper, we use 50 years (1964-2013) of US Census Annual Demographic Files (March Current Population Survey) to track the changing returns to human capital (measured as both educational attainment and potential work experience), estimating comparable earnings equations by gender at each point in time.We consider the effects of sample selection over time for both women and men and show the rising effect of selection for women in recent years. Returns to education diverge for women and men over this period in the selection-adjusted results but converge in the OLS results, while returns to potential experience converge in both sets of results. We also create annual calculations of synthetic lifetime labor force participation, hours, and earnings that indicate convergence by gender in worklife patterns, but less convergence in recent years in lifetime earnings. Thus, while some convergence has indeed occurred, the underlying mechanisms causing convergence differ for women and men, reflecting continued fundamental differences in women's and men's life experiences.

Over the past 40 years, the level of human capital investments has changed substantially for men and women. Changes in the intensive margin of college major selection have been also been substantial, as the number of graduates in humanities, social science, and teaching has declined, and the number in science, engineering, and business has increased, especially for women. However, while women are now more likely to complete a college degree than men, the distribution of college majors among college graduates remains unequal with women about 2/3 as likely as men to major in a business or science field. In this paper, we develop and estimate a dynamic overlapping generations model of human capital investment and employment decisions to understand these long-term changes in human capital investments. Our departure from the previous literature is that we separately examine college major choices, rather than aggregating these choices to the education level (e.g. college or no college). We overcome the absence of field of study information in the CPS and Census data by combining these data with auxiliary data sources which characterize the changes in field of study composition across a large number of birth cohorts. Results from counterfactual experiments show that changes in skill prices, higher schooling costs, and a reduction in the value of home for women all played an important role in the educational attainment and college major composition trends. The following are appended: (1) NSCG Data Appendix; (2) Model Solution Appendix; and (3) Type Parameter Estimates.

In 1965, a family-reunification policy for admitting immigrants to the United States replaced a system that chose immigrants based on their national origin. With this change, a 40-year hiatus in Asian immigration ended. Today, over three-quarters of US immigrants originate from Asia and Latin America. Two issues that dominate discussions of US immigration policy are the progress of post-reform immigrants and their contributions to the US economy. This book focuses on the earnings and human capital investment of Asian immigrants to the US after 1965. In addition, it provides a primer on studying immigrant economic assimilation, by explaining economists’ methodology to measure immigrant earnings growth and the challenges with this approach. The book also illustrates strategies to more fully use census data such as how to measure family income and how to use “panel data” that is embedded in the census. The book is a historical study as well as an extremely timely work from a policy angle. The passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act set the United States apart among economically developed countries due to the weight given to family unification. Based on analyses by economists—which suggest that the quality of immigrants to the US fell after the 1965 law—policymakers have called for fundamental changes in the US system to align it with the immigration systems of other countries. This book offers an alternative view point by proposing a richer model that incorporates investments in human capital by immigrants and their families. It challenges the conventional model in three ways: First, it views the decline in immigrants’ entry earnings after 1965 as due to investment in human capital, not to permanently lower “quality.” Second, it adds human capital investment and earnings growth after entry to the model. And finally, by taking investments by family members into account, it challenges the policy recommendation that immigrants should be selected for their occupational qualifications rather than family connections.

Human Capital in Gender and Development addresses timely feminist debates about the relationship between feminism, neoliberalism, and international development. The book engages with human capital theory, a labour economics theory associated with the Chicago School that now animates a wide range of political and economic governance. The book argues that human capital theory has been instrumental in constructing an economistic vision of gender equality as a tool for economic growth, and girls and women of the global South as the quintessential entrepreneurs of the post-global financial crisis era. The book’s critique of human capital theory and its role in Gender and Development gives insights into the kinds of development interventions that typify the ‘Gender Equality as Smart Economics’ agenda of the World Bank and other international development institutions. From the World Bank, to NGOs, and private businesses, discourses about the economic benefits of gender equality and women’s empowerment underpin a range of development interventions that aim to unlock the ‘untapped’ potential of the world’s women. Its implications are both conceptual and material, producing more interventionist forms of development governance, increased power by private sector actors in development, and de-politicization of gender equality issues. Human Capital in Gender and Development will be of particular interest to feminist scholars in Politics, International Relations, Development Studies, and Human Geography. It will also be a useful resource for teaching key debates about feminism, neoliberalism, and international development.

Abstract: The trend of gender inequality in education reversed since the late seventies with women catching up and surpassing men in educational attainment. Women now overtake men in completed years of school, high school completion rate, college enrollment rate, and receipt of college degrees including associate degrees, bachelor's degrees and master's degrees. Though women are the majorities on college campuses, they are over represented among adult college students. Through testing the hypothesis that people are more likely to attend college later in life, when their risk in human capital investment is high, this dissertation aims to examine the impact of gender difference in risk in human capital investment on gender difference in adult college enrollment using the Current Population Survey data. I assume that the return to education is heterogeneous across individuals and random. I use the variance of the random return to education and the mean rate of out of the labor force to measure risk in human capital investment. I find that risk in human capital investment has a significantly positive effect on adult college enrollment for both men and women. Specifically, when the risk in human capital investment is high, people are more likely to delay college entry and attend college later in life. I also show that women have higher return to education, higher variance of return to education and higher mean rate of out of the labor force than men. The fact that women have higher return to education, higher variance of return to education and higher mean rate of out of the labor force than men explains the trend in gender difference in adult college enrollment since the late 1960s. The result is robust to various measures of adult college enrollment.

This volume honours the contributions Claudia Goldin has made to scholarship and teaching in economic history and labour economics. The chapters address some closely integrated issues: the role of human capital in the long-term development of the American economy, trends in fertility and marriage, and women's participation in economic change.

This report clarifies what is now known about human capital and how it can be measured.