The role of gender and family in the labor market

This thesis studies the role of gender and family in the labor market. The first two chapters investigate the relationship between gender and family responsibilities and how these characteristics are differentially rewarded in the labor market. The third chapter explores how market changes can have important consequences for the gender earnings gap when there are large preexisting differences in specialization and productivity between men and women.;Chapter 1 examines the existence of and recent changes in the marriage and child wage premiums for men. I show that in 1970 married men received a significant hourly wage premium of 22 percent with an additional premium of 10 to 15 percent for men with children. Yet between 1970 and 1990 the premium for being married decreased by 6 percentage points while the premium for having children decreased by 2 to 7 percentage points. The positive effects of marriage and children on men's labor supply also decreased during this same period. I find that about half of the marriage premium can be attributed to positive selection of high-wage men into marriage and that changes in selection account for virtually all of the decline in the premium. In contrast, little of the decrease in the child wage premium can be attributed to changes in selection into fatherhood.;Chapter 2 analyzes the tradeoff between career and family for a specific profession---that of physicians. I find that women physicians receive an annual earnings penalty of 12 percent for being married with additional penalties of 15 to 20 percent for having children. These penalties are the result of women with family responsibilities receiving lower hourly earnings and working fewer hours per year. Women physicians also choose specialty fields and practice settings that have more opportunity to balance career and family. Fixed effects analysis shows that these findings are not the result of negative selection into marriage and motherhood, refuting the notion that women who devote more time towards family bring less skill or ability to the workplace.;Chapter 3 considers how recent changes in the healthcare industry may have differentially impacted the labor market outcomes of women versus men physicians. Significant gender differences in labor market characteristics such as specialty field and practice setting suggest that managed care may have altered the practice of medicine in ways that unintentionally favor female physicians. Using a differences-in-differences approach I show that the gap in log hourly earnings between male and female physicians in states with high managed care growth narrowed by 10 percentage points relative to states with low managed care growth. Further analysis reveals that managed care inadvertently favors female physicians by compressing the overall distribution of physician earnings and increasing the demand for specialties which have a high and rising fraction of women.