"Firming Up Inequality"
ABSTRACT
We use a massive, new, matched employer-employee database for the United States to analyze the contribution of firms to the rise in earnings inequality from 1978 to 2013. We find that two thirds of the rise in the variance of earnings is associated with workers' employers, whereas one third occurs within firms. The employer-related rise in the variance can be decomposed into two roughly equally important forces - a rise in the assortative matching of high-wage workers to high-wage firms and a rise in segregation of similar workers between firms. In contrast, we do not find a rise in the variance of firm-specific pay once we control for worker composition. The rise in the employer-related inequality was particularly strong in smaller and medium-sized firms (explaining 84% for firms with fewer than 10,000 employees), driven by worker sorting and segregation. In contrast, in the very largest firms with 10,000+ employees, almost half of the increase in the variance of earnings took place within firms, driven by both declines in earnings for employees below the median and a substantial rise in earnings for the 10% best-paid employees. We also find that for the very top earners, who experienced particularly large earnings gains over the last decades, a larger share of earnings growth occurred within firms. However, the contribution of these top earners to the overall increase in earnings inequality is small.
"Strategic Choices in Polygamous Households: Theory and Evidence from Senegal"
ABSTRACT
This paper proposes a strategic framework to account for fertility choices in polygamous households. A theoretical model specifies the main drivers of fertility in the African context and describes how the fertility of one wife might impact the behavior of her co-wives. It generates predictions to test for strategic interactions. Exploiting original data from a household survey and the Demographic and Health Surveys in Senegal, empirical tests show that children are strategic complements. One wife raises her fertility in response to an increase by the other wife, because children are the best claim to resources controlled by the husband. This result is the first quantitative evidence of a reproductive rivalry between co-wives. It suggests that the sustained high level of fertility in Africa does not merely reflect women's lack of control over births, as is often argued, but also their incentives to have many children. This paper also contributes to the literature on household behavior as one of the few attempts to open the black box of non-nuclear families.
"Do Recent Declines in U.S. Life Expectancy Mean Bad News for Healthy Life Expectancy?"
ABSTRACT
Life expectancy for non-Hispanic white (henceforth white) Americans with less than high school education has fallen in recent years—particularly for women – while life expectancy has increased substantially for the college educated population. However, the extent to which the declines/increases in life expectancy translate into healthy life expectancy remains unclear.
