الگوهای چرخه زندگی در تفاوت مردان / زنان در جستجوی کار

We investigate whether women search longer for a job than men and whether these differences change over the life cycle. Our empirical analysis exploits German register data on highly attached displaced workers. We apply duration models to analyze gender differences in job search taking into account observed and unobserved worker heterogeneity and censoring. Simple survival functions show that displaced women take longer to find a new job than comparable men. Disaggregation by age groups reveals that these differences are driven by differential behavior of women in their prime-childbearing years. There is no significant difference in job search duration among the very young and older workers. These differential outcomes remain even after we control for differences in human capital and when unobserved heterogeneity is incorporated into the model.

One of the persistent questions in economics is whether the differences in wages between men and women reflect observed differences in productivity, unobserved differences in productivity, or discrimination. One possible difference between men and women that has received relatively little attention is differences in job search and job mobility. Previous work has found that mobility among young workers is an important source of wage growth (Topel and Ward, 1992 and Von Wachter and Bender, 2006); however, evidence for the U.S. and Germany suggests that young women change jobs less often than men and experience smaller gains in wages when they do switch jobs (Loprest, 1992 and Fitzenberger and Kunze, 2005). Unfortunately, these findings are difficult to interpret because job movers are a select sample of workers, where the selection is often based on worker characteristics that are unobservable to the econometrician but are correlated with outcomes (for a discussion see e.g. von Wachter and Bender, 2006). In order to address some of the limitation with the previous research, in this paper we examine gender differences in the duration of job search and subsequent wages focusing on workers searching for a job following displacement due to a plant closing. Ideally, in order to examine gender differences in job search, we would like to have data on a random sample of workers who unexpectedly lost their job. Assuming that a plant closing is independent of the behavior of workers; then our data will come closer to the ideal data than data including workers who chose to switch jobs.1 As an extension to the previous literature we also will examine whether gender differences in search vary over the life-cycle. While there has been some theoretical work predicting differences in search behavior between men and women related to productivity differences or discrimination (e.g. Black, 1995 and Bowlus and Eckstein, 2002), little attention has been paid to life-cycle variation in the search behavior of men and women. From the limited empirical evidence so far on gender differences in job search it is not clear whether differences exist across age groups. One intuitive reason why one may expect gender differences to vary with age is related to the comparative advantage of child bearing of women, which may generate life-cycle patterns in gender differences in job search.2 In our empirical analysis, we exploit administrative panel data drawn from the German social security insurance program. We follow displaced workers until they either obtain a new job or our data end. The data cover the period from 1975 through 2001. Our use of longitudinal administrative data ensures that we have an accurate measure of the length of displacement for all workers. In addition, since we use administrative panel data where spell length is measured directly from the receipt of unemployment benefits we avoid some of the problems with previous studies that have relied on cross-sectional data — e.g. not knowing the length of time a worker searches, or having search length self-reported by the worker several periods after the time of displacement. Since our data contain a large sample of workers age 20–60, we are able to examine how gender differences in search vary over the life cycle. By applying duration models to analyze gender differences in job search taking into account observed and unobserved worker heterogeneity and censoring this study contributes new evidence on displaced workers in a European country to a literature that has been primarily shaped by studies on male displaced workers in the U.S.3 In addition, as far as we are aware, ours is the only study to examine the job search behavior of European women who have been displaced and to compare the behavior of men and women using European data.4 Finally, this study contributes to our understanding of the role that job mobility plays in producing the observed gender differences in labor market outcomes. Our empirical results show that women do experience longer spells of displacement and a larger drop in wages after displacement than men. However, when we examine these differences over the life cycle we find that the differences in job search are concentrated among workers age 24 to 35, which are prime child bearing and child rearing ages for women. Among younger and older workers we find that men and women exhibit similar lengths of displacement and similar changes in wages. While not conclusive, these results do suggest that differences in job search and mobility are related to fertility decision. More particularly, a plausible interpretation is that the presence of young children reduces displaced women's job search intensity, though our data do not allow us to measure either search intensity or the presence of children directly. Alternatively, it might be that the presence of young children causes women to increase their reservation wages. The remainder of the paper is as follows. In the next section we review the related work on displacement and job search. In Section 3 we describe our data and present some summary statistics. In Section 4 we present our empirical results on displacement durations and in Section 5 on wages. In Section 6 we discuss our results and present our conclusion.

In this study we use longitudinal register data for workers in West-Germany along with duration analysis to analyze gender differences in job search behavior. In order to examine differences in job search that results from potentially exogenous factors we focused on highly attached workers who were displaced through a plant closure. A particular strength of our data is that they cover workers of all ages so we can examine whether unemployment durations following displacement differ significantly across male and female workers by age groups. Our main empirical result shows that the gender differences in displacement durations vary across the life cycle with the largest differences occurring among workers age 26–35 — there is no significant cross-gender difference in the length of displacement among younger or older workers. This finding remains valid even after we control for a rich set of characteristics, as well as when we control for potential unobserved heterogeneity and duration dependence, so it does not appear that changes in the composition of displaced workers is driving our results. This result seems at odds with the implications of existing equilibrium search models that incorporate taste based employer discrimination (e.g. Bowlus and Eckstein, 2002) which predict that all women should experience longer spells of displacement. This observed life-cycle pattern in gender differences in displacement durations is new evidence for a European country and it would be interesting to see whether these patterns are also observed in other countries. Interestingly, our finding for West-Germany is quite similar to the life-cycle pattern we find when we conducted a similar analysis using data on displaced workers in the U.S. (Kunze and Troske, 2009). This suggests that the pattern is not unique to Germany and may be driven by some general behavioral mechanisms. It also suggests that our finding is not the result of the relatively generous unemployment benefit system in Germany. The obvious question is then, what mechanism could generate the observed life-cycle pattern in job search durations? In Kunze and Troske (2009) we present evidence supporting the hypothesis that the life cycle pattern is a function of fertility related opportunity costs. That is women in the prime childbearing and rearing years have relatively high opportunity cost of working compared to similarly aged men. In our companion paper we show that, once we focus on women who do not have a child after being displaced, men and women have similar lengths of displacement across all age groups. Unfortunately, we cannot perform a similar analysis using the German data. However, the results in both papers suggest that the fertility decisions of women have a significant impact on women's labor market mobility.