Essays in empirical labor economics

This dissertation consists of three essays in empirical labor economics with a particular focus on women in the labor market. The first essay explores how the labor market responded to the entry of women into occupations and documents that the dynamics of occupational segregation are highly non-linear and exhibit "tipping"-like patterns. Using US Census data from 1910 to 2000, I show that the evolution of male share over time for occupations that experience a relatively large inflow of females shows striking evidence of an inverse-S pattern. Focusing on the 1940s through the 1980s, I find relatively strong evidence of discontinuities in male employment growth at candidate tipping points ranging from 30 to 60 percent female in white-collar occupations and 12 to 25 percent female in blue-collar occupations. Depending on the decade, occupations experience an 18 to 50 percentage point decline in net male employment growth at the candidate tipping points. The observed tipping behavior appears consistent with a simple framework based on Schelling's (1971) social interaction model where occupational tipping results from male preferences toward the fraction female in their occupation. Supporting the model's predictions, evidence from the General Social Survey indicates that tipping points are lower in regions where males hold more sexist attitudes toward the appropriate role of women. Alternative explanations such as omitted variables, changes in the production technology and learning fall short in explaining the full set of empirical observations.;The second essay, co-authored with Kerwin Charles and Jonathan Guryan, examines the extent to which cross-market differences in women's relative labor market outcomes are de- termined by differences across markets in sexism defined as views about the appropriate role women should play in society. Using data from the General Social Survey (GSS) to measure sexism, we show that selection-corrected gender wage gaps and relative employment rates are significantly related to the degree of sexist views held by the median male, but not with male sexism at the 10th or 90th percentile. Consistent with a standard labor supply model in which sexism lowers women's offered wage, we find lower relative employment of women in more sexist markets is concentrated among women who would have worked few hours in sexisms absence. Finally, we show that the patterns described for male sexism are not apparent for female responses to the GSS questions. The results are robust to a variety of extensions, including alternative strategies for correcting for gender skill differences, and selection. We argue that these results are consistent with a taste-based model of discrimination (Becker (1957)), and are especially striking in light of results from Charles and Guryan (2008) who find that racial wage differences are related to the left tail of the racial prejudice distribution, rather than the median or right tail - exactly as the prejudice model predicts for a group whose prevalence in the labor market much less than that for women. The results suggest that sexism has important implications for the workings of labor markets for men and women.;The third and final essay, co-authored with Patricia Cortes, explores how the widespread availability of foreign domestic workers (FDWs) in Hong Kong affected native women's labor supply decisions and welfare. Our empirical strategy is based on two complementary approaches. First, exploiting differences in the expansion of the FDW program between Hong Kong and Taiwan from 1978 to 2006, we find that the program is associated with a 9 to 13 percentage point increase in employment of mothers with a young child, compared to mothers with older children. Second, using cross-sectional variation in the cost of hiring a FDW, we estimate a structural model of labor force participation and the decision to hire a FDW. We find evidence of strong complementarities between the two choices, particularly for mothers with very young children, suggesting that FDWs are a good substitute for mother's time in household production. From simulation exercises, we estimate that the availability of FDWs at current prices generates a monthly average consumer surplus for mothers of young children aged 0 to 5 of between US...