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theses

This thesis examineswomen’s fertility choices and their experiences in the labor market. In particular, I provide insights on how fertility choices of important women’s labor market behavior and outcomes in this thesis. In Chapter 2, I investigate the response of women’s fertility choices to financial incentives. I estimate the impact of, a cash-transfer type of pro-natalist policy on the probability and timing of births by evaluating the case of South Korean ‘baby bonus’ policy called ‘birth encouragement grants. I use the sample of married women taken from the Korea Labor and Income Panel Studies (KLIPS) and rely on the regional and over-time variation of the grant amounts for identification. There is the concern of endogeneity since the shared fertility patterns in the same county can affect the grant setting decision of county governments. I address thist by controlling for county fixed effects and the trend of pre-policy determinants of birth encouragement grants. Through this analysis, I find that the birth encouragement grants do not influence the fertility choices of women in Korea. Further, the results of the analysis imply that the work status and the earnings of women may be more significant factor of their fertility choices. In Chapter 3, I estimate the magnitude of the career cost of motherhood for working women in Korea, as the conclusion of Chapter 2 implies that the women’s fertility choices may be more closely related with their labor market outcome than the direct financial cost of having children. Using the Korea Labor and Income Panel Studies (KLIPS) data, I estimate the family gap in pay and job change frequency of Korean women. Unlike previous studies that only address the sample selection problem from low labor force participation of mothers, I further acknowledge that the prospect of pay and job change after childbirth can affect the fertility choices and address it by using instrumental variables. I find that motherhood induces about one job change and a 37% wage discount in South Korea; these findings are significantly different from the estimates derived from the type of specification frequently used in other studies, the fixed effect model with the Heckman selection correction. The Heckman model indicates only a 7~9% wage discount. That is, the presence of children reduces the mothers pay from their earning potentials by 7~9%. I also find that the family gap in pay can be partially explained by the information on job retention during childbirth and childrearing period. In Chapter 4, I evaluate the presence of sex discrimination in the job placement in labor market. Theoretically, uncertainty about the career breaks for children associated with female workers may drive firms to set higher bars for women for employment. Using the Youth Panel 2007 of South Korea and its rich information about college students’ educational backgrounds and future plans, I restrict the sample to the college seniors who indicated planning to seek large corporation jobs through their annual open recruitments, which are supposed to be fair and merit-based. Then, using a variation of the classical Oaxaca-Blinder method (Oaxaca, 1973; Blinder, 1973), I decompose the male-female difference in the probability of being placed in the large corporation jobs after college into the parts that can be explained by the average differences in the characteristics by sex and the part that cannot be explained by the characteristics. I focus on the labor market outcome of the first job of the college graduates to minimize the impact of unobservable factors of the gender gap in the labor market outcome other than the discrimination such as women sorting out for easier jobs once they form a family. The result supports the presence of sex discrimination in the large corporation open recruitments in Korea and confirms that female college students must make more human capital investments or ‘pass higher bars’ to have the same chance of employment by large corporations.

ETD_8296

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Selim Choi

doi:10.7282/T3862KK2

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.