IntroductionWe examine the cumulative impact of physically demanding or environmentally hazardous job characteristics on health. Work-life, including adverse working conditions, is a potential source of poor health and disparities in health, yet these factors get relatively little attention in the health economics literature. Individuals work many hours over their life, so their cumulative exposure to working conditions can be an important source of health disparities. A better understanding of differences in exposure and impacts across age, race, and gender may lead to solutions to these problems.There is much research suggesting that accumulated stressors, such as those from work, may lead to poor health. Specifically, research from biologic and physiologic studies shows evidence that longer exposure to adverse conditions is likely to result in greater harm to health. To address the issue of the harmful impacts of cumulative exposure, we use the rich, panel-data available in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). The PSID includes measures of both health and occupation as well as other factors. We merge PSID data with time-varying job characteristics from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) (USDOL, 1991). The longitudinal nature of the PSID data allows us to develop measures of cumulative exposure and to control for lagged measures of health. We use 5-year windows of exposure to job conditions to measure adverse working conditions and then to estimate the effects of these conditions on self reported health status. Access to data on health earlier in life helps to mitigate concerns over self-selection into jobs based on the ability to handle these potentially adverse conditions. Our results are estimated using ordered probit/random effects estimators and suggest that individuals who work in jobs with 'adverse' conditions experience declines in their health.◆ We thank Steven Lehrer for helpful comments and Nicolas Williams for advice on the occupational data in the PSID. This work was supported by Grant Number R01AG027045 from the National Institute on Aging. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute on Aging or the National Institutes of Health. Yamaguchi acknowledges SHARCNET for providing computational resources. Linda Leo-Summers assisted us with the data. NIH Public AccessAuthor Manuscript Health Econ. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2012 May 1. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author ManuscriptImportantly, and in contrast to much of the extant literature, we find distinctive difference in the impact of job characteristics by demographic group. For instance, for black men, we find that a one standard deviation increase in cumulative physical demands decreases health by an amount that is equal to a decrease of a year of schooling. We find very small effects, however, for white men. We find that exposure to physically demanding jobs significantly decreases the health of young ...

This paper proposes a new approach to modeling heterogeneous human capital using task data from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles. The key feature of the model is that it departs from the Roy model, which treats occupations as distinct categories, and conceives of occupations as bundles of tasks. The advantages of this approach are that it can accommodate many occupations without computational burden and provide a clear interpretation as to how and why skills are differently rewarded across occupations. The model is structurally estimated by the Kalman filter using the NLSY79.

We estimate the causal effects of childcare availability on the maternal employment rate using prefecture panel data constructed from the Japanese quinquennial census 1990-2010. We depart from previous contributions by controlling for prefecture fixed effects, without which the estimates can be severely biased upward. We find that the treatment effect is heterogeneous: the employment rate of mothers in nuclear households increases with childcare availability, while that of mothers in three-generation households does not. We apply our estimates to decomposition of the growth of the maternal employment rate from 1990 to 2010. The decomposition indicates that the increase in childcare availability raised the maternal employment rate by about two percentage points. We also find that dissolution of three-generation household lowered the maternal employment rate. This negative effect is more strongly pronounced in small prefectures where the household structure changed dramatically.

How did skilled-biased technological change affect wage inequality, particularly between men and women? To answer that question this paper constructs a task-based Roy model in which workers possess a bundle of basic skills, and occupations are characterized as a bundle of basic tasks. The model is structurally estimated using the task data from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles and the PSID. The main empirical finding is that men have more motor skills than women, but the returns to motor skills have dropped significantly, accounting for more than 40% of the narrowing gender wage gap. Keywords: Roy model, task-based approach, occupational choice, skill-biased technological change, soft skills.

This paper proposes a new approach to modeling heterogeneous human capital using the data from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles. The key feature of the model is that it conceives of an occupation as a bundle of tasks, departs from the Roy model in which occupations are treated as distinct categories. The proposed approach has advantages in that it can accommodate many occupations without computational burden and provides a clear interpretation as to how and why skills are differently rewarded across different occupations. The model is structurally estimated by the Kalman filter using the NLSY79.

Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we provide evidence that to understand household decisions and evaluate policies designed to affect individual welfare, it is important to add an intertemporal dimension to the by-now standard static collective models of the household. Specifically, we document that the observed differences in labor supply by gender and marital status do not arise suddenly at the time of marriage, but rather emerge gradually over time. We then propose an intertemporal collective model that has the potential of explaining the observed patterns.

This paper constructs and estimates a career decision model where individuals search for both career matching and employer matching to understand wage growth and career mobility using the NLSY79. It departs from previous papers in that career mobility decisions and participation decisions are explicitly modeled. I find substantial returns to career-specific experience. However, college graduates' wage grows little through career-match upgrading, which results in a lower incidence of career changes than high school graduates. The finding suggests that college graduates learn about their suitable careers before they enter a labor market.

ABSTRACT. This paper constructs and estimates a model of strategic wage bargaining with on-the-job search to explore three different components of wages: general human capital, match-specific capital, and outside option. As the workers find better job opportunities, the current employer has to compete with outside firms to retain them. This between-firm competition results in wage growth even when productivity remains the same.The model is estimated by a simulated minimum distance estimator and data from the NLSY79. The results indicate that the improved value of outside option raises wages of ten-year-experienced workers by 16%.