Research

Promoting Innovation: Evidence from R&D Special Zones in South Korea

In this project, I examine how domestic outsourcing practices affect gender disparities in labor markets. Specifically, I aim to address three key questions: 1) Do workers in female-dominated occupations suffer larger wage losses after being outsourced? 2) Within the same occupations, do women face greater wage reductions after being outsourced? 3) If so, what mechanisms explain this, and how has it contributed to the overall gender inequality in the labor market? Regarding the first question, I find that workers in female-dominated occupations, such as cleaning or secretarial work, experience more significant earnings reductions after being outsourced than workers in male-dominated occupations, such as security or logistics, using German administrative data. Continuing work on the project will further investigate the remaining questions.

In our paper “The Impact of Early Public Childcare on Child Penalties,” we have shown that the expansion of public childcare for very young children improves various labor market outcomes of mothers. This leads to a pertinent question: If more mothers return to work after childbirth and work longer hours in higher-paying positions due to increased public childcare availability, how does this affect the labor market outcomes of young female workers (pre-mothers) or their male coworkers? Better performance by mothers in labor markets post-childbirth could empower other women or influence employers’ hiring or promotion preferences for women. We aim to investigate this by leveraging variations in the employment share of mothers who gave birth in the year of childcare expansion at the county-establishment-occupation level. Using German administrative data, we identify coworkers of mothers within each establishment-occupation cell and examine how the proportion of mothers exposed to a sudden and large childcare expansion affects the wage growth of pre-mothers or male coworkers. Our preliminary findings indicate that pre-mothers in occupation-county cells with a higher concentration of mothers giving birth in the year of large childcare expansion experienced greater wage growth before becoming mothers.