The impact of IRCA on the job opportunities and earnings of Mexican-American and Hispanic-American workers.

PIP: The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) introduced substantial civil and/or criminal penalties to employers who hire illegal workers, with the main goal of reducing the demand for undocumented labor. However, in the interest of addressing certain concerns about the law, the Immigration Act of 1990 was passed to require various branches of the federal government to intensify efforts to disseminate the antidiscrimination provisions of IRCA. The authors studied the earnings gap between Mexican, Hispanic, and non-Hispanic white male workers which resulted from changes in both the wage structure and immigration laws of the 1980s. It appears that Mexican and Hispanic workers were adversely affected by the changes. The analysis of data from the 1980 and 1990 1% Public Use Microdata Samples determined that Mexican and Hispanic labor were adversely affected by the increase in the returns to skills during the 1980s given their relatively lower levels of educational attainment and labor market experience. At-risk workers increased their work effort and level of productivity to reduce the effects of legislation-induced employment losses. Data were also used from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for the period 1983-92.^ieng

Will U.S. fertility rise? Watch the wage.

The author reviews various methods for projecting U.S. fertility trends and finds that "a promising approach to anticipate the course of future fertility is to examine the tradeoffs women see between children and work outside the home, especially in the context of men's earnings."

Equality and fertility in the kibbutz.

PIP: The kibbutz is a uniquely socially organized entity that consists of members having equal consumption possibilities, which are not tied to production. There are no wages and child rearing is performed outside the family unit. A theoretical model is presented which explains the differences between fertility in the kibbutz and in the city, and which is tested with data from the 1983 Israeli Census of Population and Housing. The model includes family consumption, the number of children, the time a parent works, years of finished schooling, duration of marriage, wages, and the time a parent cares for own children. The sample population only considers first marrieds with both spouses present, where the wife is at least 35 years old: 77,455 urban families and 2532 kibbutz families. The results of the ordinary least squares analysis indicate that socioeconomic variables explain fertility in the city much better. Regressions which include oriental origin show that women of oriental origin have 1.663 more children in the city and .343 more children in the kibbutz than Western women. Only 10% of the kibbutzim (plural of kibbutz) had an oriental background, while 40% had an oriental background in the city in 1983. Other control variables were immigration status and duration of marriage. The effect of mother's education shows the number of children decreasing with education until reaching a minimum of 13.9 years, or 14.5 years for mother's education and 10.5 years for father's education in the city. Parents' education is insignificant in the kibbutz. Father's ethnicity affects fertility in the city, but mother's ethnicity affects fertility in the kibbutz. Mother's predicted wage is added to her education; the results show a positive effect in both the city and kibbutz, which shows a larger effect. The reason is that education is more valuable in the city in securing work. Regressions with fathers' ages and education indicate that fathers' predicted wages is positive in both places. Mothers' predicted wages remains positive, but is less than fathers' preducted wages. Parents' education shows a negative effect in the city and a small negative effect or no effect in the kibbutz.^ieng

An economic analysis of fertility, market participation and marriage behaviour in recent Japan.

PIP: This is the 1st attempt in modelling fertility, labor force participation and marriage rate using Japanese data. The authors use Butz and Ward's model and extend it to a simultaneous equation system as in the case of Winegarden. Although the estimates obtained by Full Information Maximum Likelihood and Three Stage Least Squares of the model are statistically significant, some of the signs of the estimates are not consistent to a priori predictions. The crux of the model is that an increase in the wages of men has an unambiguous positive effect on fertility, whereas an increase in wages of women may not lead to higher fertility due to the dominance of substitution effect. But the issue of whether there are discriminatory employment practices and cultural pressures on the participation of women in the labor force, raised by the results obtained can only be answered using a larger set of data or with the help of panel data.^ieng

Economic influences on birth rates.

PIP: A researcher uses an econometric analysis to test his theory that economic developments influence birth rates in post World War II in Great Britain. The base of the analysis consists of a group of equilibrium relationships examining the levels of conditional birth rates (at each birth order and each mother's age) and the levels of economic variables, e.g., ratio of women's hourly wage after taxes. The leading cause of a decrease in births, especially after 1974, was an increase in women's net wages in comparison to men's net wages. Additional evidence suggested that higher women's wages increase the cost of an additional child by raising missed earnings, and this higher opportunity cost reduces the chance of another birth. On the other hand, if men's earnings are higher, couples have more children and at a young age. Further, the higher the real house prices the more likely women are to postpone starting a family and, in the case of 20-24 year old women, these high prices also deter them from having a 2nd child. Higher house prices do not affect higher order births, however. When all other things are equal, women from larger families have a tendency to begin having children in their 30s and produce smaller families than those women from smaller families. Large child allowances encourage 3rd-4th births and early motherhood. To increase fertility to replacement level over the long term, the current level of child allowances would have to double costing about 5 billion British pounds or 1.5% of the gross domestic product.^ieng

Intercountry comparisons of labor force trends and of related developments: an overview.

PIP: This paper is a survey of analyses of women's labor force growth in 12 industrialized countries, presented at a conference in Sussex, England in 1983. The main focus is on growth of the labor force of married women from 1960-1980; trends in fertility, wages, and family instability are discussed. In all countries, wages of women were lower than wages of men, although between 1960 and 1980 labor force rates of married women rose in most of the industrialized countries. 2 factors that are associated with this growth are declines in fertility and increases in divorce rates. The 12 countries studied are: 1) Australia, 2) Britain, 3) France, 4) Germany, 5) Israel, 6) Italy, 7) Japan, 8) Netherlands, 9) Spain, 10) Sweden, 11) US, and 12) USSR. The substitution variables (wages of women or their education) have strong positive effects on labor force participation in most cases, and in most cases the positive wage elasticities exceed the negative income elasticities by a sizable margin. A summary table estimating parameters of the P-function for each country, and their predictive performance in time series, are included. From 1960-1980 the average per country growth in participation of married women was 2.84% per year. Wages of working women, in this same period grew, on average, faster than wages of men in most countries, in part due to selectivity by education in labor force growth. While growth rates of real wages across countries have a weak relation with the differential growth rates of married women's labor force, the relation is strong when country parameters are taken into account. The dominance of the "discouraged" over the "added" workers in female labor force growth appears to be upheld internationally. On the average, total fertility rate dropped from 2.42 in 1970 to 1.85 in 1980. Both fertility declines and the growth of family instability appear to represent lagged effects of longer term developments in the labor force of women. Women's wages are lower than men's wages in all countries; wage differentials narrowed in all other countries over the past 2 decades. This narrowing was due both to women's educational attainment catching up with men's, and to a positive educational selectivity of women's labor force growth during this period. Ultimately, without labor market discrimination and with equal educational attainment, the wage gap can be eliminated only when sex differences in lifetime work experience vanish.^ieng