Trends in the inequality of extended household income (the sum of market income and the imputed value of time devoted to household production) differ significantly from trends in the inequality of market income in the U.S. in the last five decades, raising questions regarding the best measure of changes in inequality in living standards. The imputed value of time devoted to household production has fallen considerably, with proportionately larger impacts on money-poor households. While extended income is distributed more equally across households than market income in every period, the rise in inequality is larger for extended income compared to market income. In other words, the ability of household production to buffer inequality in market income appears has declined over time. Across household types, single parent households see the smallest increase in extended income. This analysis applies a lower-bound replacement cost value to hours of time reported in household production and is robust to the use of different valuation and equivalence scales.

We show that income enhances the enjoyment of leisure, however largely not because of diminishing marginal utility of leisure and different patterns of leisure consumption. Instead, we show that this is largely attributable to cognitive stress – low income constrains the mental bandwidth necessary to enjoy leisure. Arguments that more leisure mitigates income inequalities are overstated. This is because while the rich devote less time to leisure, the time they spend on leisure brings them more utility. These findings also have important implications for how we model labour supply. Wage increases may not just increase the marginal cost of leisure but also enhance the utility derived from leisure. Finally, our research speaks to debates concerned with understanding the role that money plays in happiness. Our findings suggest that the positive utility enhancing effect of income is largely due to the role income plays in buying a ‘restful’ leisure.

Why are urban gender wage gaps lower in northern than in southern states of India, despite greater gender equality (in non-wage dimensions) in the south? I show that this is due to greater suppression of women’s low-wage employment in the north, resulting in stronger positive selection: selection-corrected gaps that impute wages for the non-employed based on observed and unobserved characteristics are similar for both north and south. I suggest that stronger social norms in the north that stigmatize women’s wage work produce lower participation rates, particularly among less-educated, low-wage women who do not have access to white-collar jobs. These patterns of participation introduce significant selection biases in the measurement of gender wage gaps and help explain why urban gender wage gaps are lower in the north.

How is the effect of motherhood on gender wage inequality mediated by economic development and urbanization? Combining rich cross-sectional and panel data, this paper provides the first estimates for the effect of children on women’s wages and gender wage inequality in India. I find substantial heterogeneity in this “motherhood penalty:” wage reductions following motherhood are large for urban women, but negligible for rural women. To explain this difference, I show that differences in the nature of work environments—in particular, the incidence of skilled, formal employment among urban women—play an important role in mediating the wage effects of reduced labor supply following childbirth. Economic development and urbanization reduce the compatibility between childrearing and paid work, even as they may result in a convergence in gender differences in educational and occupational outcomes, with contradictory effects on gender inequality. 

We find that women sorting into lower paying firms explains nearly half of the gender pay gap in South Africa. Using matched employer-employee panel data covering the universe of formal workers, we show sorting varies considerably over the life cycle: the firm-pay gender gap is negligible for the youngest workers, grows steeply for 25–35 year olds (i.e. typical child-rearing years), and narrows for older workers. The increase is driven by those continuously employed — while women are almost as likely as men to switch firms, men are more likely to switch to better-paying firms, consistent with discrimination or non-pay amenities. Churn also contributes to the gap (though is relatively constant), since women enter formal employment at worse-paying firms than men. The relative importance of the continuously employed versus entrants depends on the size of the formal sector, thus linking the life cycle patterns underlying gender gaps with economic development.

Workers in care occupations and industries in the United States earn less than counterparts with similar personal characteristics in other jobs. We document considerable gradation within care services, showing that workers employed in social assistance earn less than workers in other care industries such as education and healthcare. We posit that social assistance providers are particularly vulnerable to pay penalties because their clients suffer from low bargaining power, weak political voice, and cultural stigmatization. Institutional context matters—social assistance has witnessed a shift from public to private provision since the 1980s; unlike other care industries, private sector workers in social assistance (most of whom work in non-profits) earn less than their counterparts in the public sector. We suggest that public subcontracting to private firms is a cost-cutting strategy that has put downward pressure on the wages of social assistance providers.

How much do parents spend on children in the U.S.? While the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) regularly addresses this question, it considers only money expenditures, omitting the sizeable monetary value of parental time. The 2017 and 2019 Panel Study of Income Dynamics offers a unique opportunity to provide a more complete picture. Analysis of this data reveals considerable substitutability between unpaid and paid childcare and generates estimates of average total expenditures that include a replacement cost estimate of the value of parental time. These estimates, constructed for comparability with USDA measures, reveal both higher levels of average parental expenditure and different patterns across household structure and income. These findings challenge public policies that use USDA estimates as a reference point for setting the child support obligations of non-custodial parents and reimbursement rates for foster care. They also undermine many conventional equivalence scales and measures of income/time poverty.

Earnings in care services are lower than in other industries, particularly among professional and managerial employees, and are more compressed than in other industries. The growth of primarily female employment in care services since the 1980s has buffered overall increases in wage inequality while slowing convergence in the gender wage differential.

The authors argue that paid providers of care services in the United States (in health, education, and social service industries) are less able than providers of business services to capture value-added or to extract rents because limited consumer sovereignty, incomplete information regarding quality, and large positive externalities reduce their relative market power. In addition, many care jobs enforce normative responsibility for others and require specific skills that limit cross-industry mobility. Analysis of Current Population Survey data for 2014 to 2019 reveals significant pay penalties in care services relative to business services, controlling for factors such as gender, education, occupation, and public or private employment. Women’s concentration in care services explains a significant proportion of the gender wage gap and raises the possibility of significant potential benefits from industry-level bargaining strategies.

Why is maternal employment higher in rural than in urban India? Among the relevant supply-side factors, previous research has emphasized that rural work is more compatible with childcare. Results from the Indian Time Use Survey of 2019 show that hours of active maternal childcare are only slightly lower in rural areas, but the temporal and spatial flexibility of paid employment is much greater, making it easier for mothers to accommodate childcare responsibilities. In particular, rural women’s work affords them greater access to flexible hours and the ability to work in close proximity to the home. Consequently, the negative effects of motherhood on employment are significantly greater for urban women than for rural women. This finding cannot be explained by rural–urban differences in household structure or resource constraints. These results redirect attention from average levels of time use towards a more nuanced analysis of sequence, timing, and opportunities for joint production or multitasking. 

Among the subdisciplines of engineering, environmental engineering is distinctive in three aspects. First, descriptions of the profession of environmental engineering emphasize that environmental engineers solve problems to prevent harm, which typically is an important motivation for taking a job in care work. Second, the percentage of degrees awarded to women is highest for environmental among all subdisciplines of engineering (i.e., 53.3% of bachelor’s degrees, 46.3% of master’s degrees, and 43.6% of doctoral degrees in environmental engineering conferred in 2020 were awarded to women). Third, median salaries for environmental engineers–controlling for other variables–are lowest among engineering subdisciplines (i.e., $82,036 per year in 2019), despite high levels of educational attainment and training. Our analysis of environmental engineers working in the United States strongly suggests that the profession of environmental engineering is highly susceptible to what is known as the care penalty. The care penalty is a function of market dynamics, which tend to undervalue work that generates substantial unpriced benefits for others. The care penalty often is observed in jobs characterized by high levels of intrinsic motivation, such as concern for human welfare. Additional data would be useful to further evaluate the care penalty in environmental engineering in other countries. To address the care penalty, we do not suggest that environmental engineers should become less caring. Rather environmental engineers should be aware of this potential economic risk and seek to mitigate the care penalty in two specific ways. First environmental engineers should encourage life-cycle principles and environmental full-cost accounting in order to increase fungibility among different measures of the components of the triple bottom line of people (i.e., human welfare), planet (i.e., planetary health), and prosperity (i.e., financial gain). Second, environmental engineers should clearly demonstrate the unique contributions that technically skilled commitments to human welfare can generate. We suggest that a greater awareness of these issues could build on and strengthen growing public concerns regarding environmental sustainability. Finally, we suggest that distinctive attributes of environmental engineering may prove critical to unlocking growth in the engineering workforce as care for human welfare and planetary health.

The new category of workers officially labeled “essential” in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States includes a large percentage of women working in care services. In many of these services, health risks are often considered part of the job and are uncompensated by hazard pay. Building on previous feminist research explaining the devaluation of care work, this paper uses the most recent available data from the US Current Population Survey to show that workers in essential care service jobs – especially women – earn less than other essential workers. This pattern cannot be explained by differences in unionization rates and points to other differences in bargaining power, including institutional factors influencing the earnings of doctors and nurses. Care penalties have significant implications for the future supply of care services as the pandemic persists, highlighting the need to develop broad coalitions to challenge the undervaluation of care work.