From 1975 to 2005, the variance in incomes of American families with children increased by two-thirds. Labor market studies of the growth in inequality emphasize the rising pay of college graduates, while demographers study changes in family structure. We join these lines of research by viewing income inequality as the product of the distribution of earnings in the labor market and the pooling ...

Conditional cash transfer programs have spread to over 80 countries in the past two decades, but little is known about their long-term effects on the youth they target. This paper estimates the impact of childhood exposure to the Mexican program Progresa on economic outcomes in early adulthood by leveraging the age structure of program benefits and geographic variation in early program penetrat...

As labor market data is scarce in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), this paper uses household survey data to analyze the determinants of the gender gap in the labor market and its welfare implications for five SSA countries in multinomial logit models with propensity score matching method. The analysis confirms that education opens up opportunities for women to escape agricultural feminization and enga...

College-educated workers entering the labor market in 1940 experienced a 4-fold increase in their labor earnings between the ages of 25 and 55; in contrast, the increase was 2.6-fold for those entering the market in 1980. For workers without a college education these figures are 3.6-fold and 1.5-fold, respectively. Why are earnings profiles flatter for recent cohorts? We build a parsimonious mo...

Gaza’s population suffers from a multitude of problems, including high levels of unemployment, poverty and polluted water sources. Gazan women in particular have to struggle to support their families because of few job options available to them. Many women have business ideas that could bring in revenue. They just lack support and financial backing to get started. In the fourth quarter of 2012,...

Are the education and skills of American workers adequate to the demands of today’s jobs? For at least three decades, academics and policymakers have heatedly debated this question. First came the perception, current in the 1970s, that the American labor force was overeducated relative to labor market needs. By this view, American workers faced a rough future in which their rising educational l...

The gender gap in working conditions has barely improved in South Korea where various measures for gender equality have been in place for a relatively long time. Furthermore, the female employment rate is also the lowest in OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries. This study will evaluate the stratified structure of the labor market to identify the causes and will...

During the last 30 years, Turkey has undergone profound economic and social transformations, including fundamental shifts from the state-oriented economy to the market-oriented economy; large scale modernization investments in telecommunication and transportation services; and the low-intensity ongoing armed-conflict concentrated in the country’s Southeastern Region. For such a period, using th...