Three essays in labor economics: fertility expectations and career choice, specialization and the marriage premium, and estimating risk aversion using labor supply data

Women, on average, are found in systematically different careers than men. Thereason for this phenomenon is not fully understood, in part because expectations playa vital role in the process of career choice. Different religious groups have differentbeliefs on the importance of child bearing, so fertility expectations should differ byreligious group. I include a woman's religious denomination in regressions on mea-sures of occupational flexibility. Jehovah's Witnesses choose the most flexible careersfollowed by Pentecostal, Catholic, Baptist, and Mainline Protestant women. Jewishwomen generally choose the least flexible careers. This is consistent with the humancapital notion that women are choosing different careers than men rather than beingforced into different job paths.If women are choosing jobs that allow them to take responsibility for home pro-duction, how does this affect their husbands? Male wage regressions that includemarital status dummy variables find a marriage wage premium of 10 to 40%. Thispremium may occur because wives are taking responsibility for home production andhusbands are free to focus their attention on productivity at work. It may also bethat factors unobserved to the researcher may make a man more productive and morelikely to marry. I use religious denomination as a proxy for specialization within thehome. Men in more traditional religious denominations enjoy a higher marriage wagepremium, which is evidence that household specialization of labor is an important cause of the wage premium.The choice of a career, whether to marry, and most other important life decisionsare dependent on one's risk tolerance. The role of risk preferences in such choices isnot fully understood, largely because relative risk aversion (y) is hard to empiricallyquantify. Chetty (2006) derives a formula for ° based on the link between utility andlabor supply decisions. I estimate y at the micro level using the 1996 Panel Studyof Income Dynamics. I compare y to an estimate based on hypothetical gamblesand find the measures substantially different. This supports Chetty's claim that ex-pected utility theory cannot suffciently explain choices under uncertainty in differentdomains.