A. (Agnieszka) Postepska, PhD
Associate Professor, Program Director BSc EOR
Gender norms and gender-stereotypical labor market behavior across generations. Evidence from conditional second moments.
Recent literature delivers evidence of intergenerational correlation in terms of gender stereotypical behavior in the labor market (Humlum, Nandrup, & Smith, 2019). There can be two explanations for this pattern: selection and causality. Relying on identification through second moments, this paper delivers new evidence that while selection drives the observed correlation in the gender-stereotypical behavior, causality operates in the other direction. Parents with more stereotypical occupations tend to have children with less stereotypical aspirations. The results are important for policymakers as policies aiming at gender balance across occupations might not have the desired intergenerational spillovers if gender norms remain unchanged.
Gender heterogeneity, ethnic capital and the intergenerational transmission of educational attainment
This paper investigates how gender, parental, and ethnic capital interact in the intergenerational transmission of human capital. Relying on heteroskedasticity to identify parameters in the presence of endogenous regressors, I find evidence that the transfer of ethnic capital benefits women more than men. Moreover, introducing heterogeneity with respect to parental educational attainment reveals that the positive effect of ethnicity among women decreases slightly with the mother's education. However, accounting for gender heterogeneity in the interaction between parents' schooling and ethnic environment reveals that both men and women benefit from advantageous ethnic environments. Still, the effect is stronger for women, and it increases with the father’s schooling. The observed differences could reflect different socialization styles and differential investments in children's schooling, driven by substitution patterns between parental and ethnic capital applied to sons and daughters.
Willingness to connect to electricity among unconnected households in Burkina Faso (joint with Leopold Sarr)
This project aims to take a closer look at the willingness to connect to the grid electricity among households in Burkina Faso both in on-grid and off-grid areas. Preliminary evidence suggests that households in off gird areas are willing to pay more for connection. This could indicate either over-optimism about the benefits that the grid electricity brings to household or selectivity of the roll-out programs.
The part-time trap - explaining Dutch women's labor market patterns (joint with Uli Schneider) Gender inequality is a hot topic in many social sciences. Concerning the labor market, the focus lies mainly on the wage gap and career developments. Childbearing and its effect on labor supply appear to be the main driver for observed differences between men and women. We take a new look at a specific “child penalty” - the persistently lower working hours among women throughout their working lives. We bring economics and psychology together to uncover the contributing factors for enduring part-time employment spells. We develop a model that permits forecasting the effects of policies aiming to create equal opportunities in the labor market. We combine results from psychology (reference-dependent preferences) with a traditional model of life-cycle labor supply. The model allows preferences to change over time and depend on previous choices made in the labor market. Changing preferences are nothing novel for psychologists. They have collected evidence of these reference-dependent preferences by conducting numerous laboratory experiments. In these experiments, psychologists can treat individuals differently to identify deviations from "rational" behavior. Economists traditionally assume that preferences do not change over time, at least not outside of exogenous changes like, for example, in the family composition. By bringing economics and psychology together, we propose a framework that improves our understanding of how strongly observed gender differences are due to labor market frictions and due to changes in preferences. One unique policy reform in the Netherlands allows us to determine the influence of both factors empirically.
| Last modified: | 25 June 2022 3.46 p.m. |