Latin American countries are generally characterized as displaying high income and earnings inequality overall along with high inequality by gender, race, and ethnicity. However, the latter phenomenon is not a major contributor to the former phenomenon. Using household survey data from four...

This report examines male gender issues and their potential negative impact on male development. It finds that HIV/AIDS, substance abuse, occupational injury, violence, and incarceration and other forms of institutionalization is proportionately affect men. Moreover, changing work patterns have...

Decisions about childbearing and market work are significantly interrelated. Although there are many estimates of the effects of fertility on labor supply, few of them have adequately addressed the problems of simultaneity inherent in these choices. In our research we use exogenous variations in...

Economists’ wariness of data mining may be misplaced, even in cases where economic theory provides a well-specified model for estimation. We discuss how new data mining/ensemble modeling software, for example the program TreeNet, can be used to create predictive models. We then show how for a...

This assessment considers the worldwide costs from 1900 to 2050 of continued gender inequality. The main cost is considered to be the inefficient underutilization of women in production. This can be measured in terms of their correspondingly lower earnings and expressed as a percentage of actual...

Paper Prepared for the International Conference for Promoting Equal Employment Opportunity for Women. April 23, 2008

A customary gender division of labor is one in which women and men are directed towards certain tasks and/or explicitly prohibited from performing others. We offer an explanation as to why the gender division of labor is so often enforced by custom, and why customary gender divisions of labor...

This paper gives an overview of the current (and recent past) status of women economists in the United States and describes what American economists have done to promote gender equality in the economics profession. Initiatives include in large part what the American Economic Association, through...