Showing papers by "Lawrence F. Katz published in 2010"

Dynamics of the Gender Gap for Young Professionals in the Financial and Corporate Sectors

Abstract: The careers of MBAs from a top US business school are studied to understand how career dynamics differ by gender. Although male and female MBAs have nearly identical earnings at the outset of their careers, their earnings soon diverge, with the male earnings advantage reaching almost 60 log points a decade after MBA completion. Three proximate factors account for the large and rising gender gap in earnings: differences in training prior to MBA graduation, differences in career interruptions, and differences in weekly hours. The greater career discontinuity and shorter work hours for female MBAs are largely associated with motherhood.

Putting the Co in Education: Timing, Reasons, and Consequences of College Coeducation from 1835 to the Present. NBER Working Paper No. 16281.

Abstract: The history of coeducation in U.S. higher education is explored through an analysis of a database containing almost all 4-year undergraduate institutions that operated in 1897, 1924, 1934, or 1980. The opening of coeducational institutions was continuous throughout its history, and the switching from single-sex was also fairly constant from 1835 to the 1950s before accelerating in the 1960s and 1970s. Older and private single-sex institutions were slower to become coeducational, and institutions persisting as single-sex into the 1970s had lower enrollment growth than those that switched earlier. Access to coeducational institutions was associated with increased women’s educational attainment.

The Career Cost of Family

Abstract: This paper concerns the career costs of family and how these costs have changed in occupations at the upper end of the education and income spectrums. Career costs of family include penalties to labor supply behavior that is more compatible with having a family, such as job interruptions, short hours, and part-time work. Self-employment, when it involves owning a practice, often requires more hours of work because of classic agency problems and is less conducive to family. But when self-employment does not entail capital ownership it often enables women to set their own hours and enjoy greater workplace flexibility. We study the pecuniary penalties for these family-related amenities, how women have responded to them, and how the penalties have changed over time. The career costs of family vary greatly across the high-end careers we study. More important, perhaps, is that the penalties to family-conducive behaviors have largely decreased over time. We conclude that many professions at the high end (e.g., pharmacy, optometry, some medical specialties, veterinary medicine) have experienced an increase in workplace flexibility driven often by exogenous changes but also endogenously because of increased numbers of women. Some sectors, notably in the corporate and financial areas, have lagged.

Grand Challenges in the Study of Employment and Technological Change

Abstract: Leading economists from Paul Samuelson to Paul Krugman have labored to allay the fear that technological advances may reduce overall employment, causing mass unemployment as workers are displaced by machines. This ‘lump of labor fallacy’ - positing that there is a fixed amount of work to be done so that increased labor productivity reduces employment - is intuitively appealing and demonstrably false. Technological improvements create new products and services, shifting workers from older to newer activities. Higher productivity raises incomes, increasing demand for labor throughout the economy. Hence, in the long run technological progress affects the composition of jobs not the number of jobs.In 1900, for example, 41 percent of the U.S. workforce worked in agriculture. After a century of astonishing agricultural productivity growth, the number stood at 2 percent in 2000. This Green Revolution transformed physical and cognitive skill demands and the fabric of American life. But it did not reduce total employment. The employment-to-population ratio rose over the twentieth century as women moved from home to market, and the unemployment rate fluctuated cyclically with no trend increase.What is fallacious in the ‘lump of labor fallacy’ is the supposition that there is a limited quantity of jobs. It is not fallacious, however, to posit that technological advance creates winners and losers. The shift from the artisanal shop to the factory with mechanization in the nineteenth century reduced the demand for skilled craft workers and raised it for more educated workers (managers, engineers, and clerks) and for less-skilled operatives. More recent technological changes from electrification to computerization have expanded the demand for highly-educated workers but substituted for less-skilled production workers. Technological improvements raise overall living standards but may adversely affect the quality of jobs for some workers.Two forces are rapidly shifting the quality of jobs, reshaping the earnings distribution, altering economic mobility, and redefining gender roles in OECD economies. These forces are, first, employment polarization (a demand-side force) and, second, a reversal of the gender gap in higher education (a supply-side force), reflecting women's rising educational attainment and men's stagnating educational attainment. The result has been a labor market that greatly rewards workers with college and graduate degrees but is unfavorable to the less-educated, particularly less-educated males. The economic and social repercussions are only starting to receive study.

Putting the Co in Education: Timing, Reasons, and Consequences of College Coeducation from 1835 to the Present

Abstract: The history of coeducation in U.S. higher education is explored through an analysis of a database containing information on all institutions offering four-year undergraduate degrees that operated in 1897, 1924, 1934, or 1980, most of which still exist today. These data reveal surprises about the timing of coeducation and the reasons for its increase. Rather than being episodic and caused by financial pressures brought about by wars and recessions, the process of switching from single-sex to coeducational colleges was relatively continuous from 1835 to the 1950s before it accelerated (especially for Catholic institutions) in the 1960s and 1970s. We explore the empirical implications of a model of switching from single-sex to coeducation in which schools that become coeducational face losing donations from existing alumni but, because they raise the quality of new students, increase other future revenues. We find that older and private single-sex institutions were slower to become coeducational and that institutions persisting as single sex into the 1970s had lower enrollment growth in the late 1960s and early 1970s than those that switched earlier. We also find that access to coeducational institutions in the first half of the twentieth century was associated with increased women's educational attainment. Coeducation mattered to women's education throughout U.S. history and it mattered to a greater extent in the more distant past than in the more recent and celebrated period of change.