Essays on Men's Preferences and Gender Inequality in the Labor Market

Sammanfattning: Reference Points for Men’s Parental Leave-Taking Behavior:Evidence from Swedish ReformsThis paper tests the hypothesis of reference dependence in men's parental leave takeup. Using register data, I leverage two reforms introducing earmarked provision for fathers. A key empirical challenge in separating reference point behavior arises from the fact that the earmark provisions also altered men's financial incentives to bunch around the value of the provision. To address this issue, I net out behavioral responses to the financial incentives by calculating and controlling for their size and exploiting the fact that financial incentives remained unchanged for sub-groups of households. The findings reveal that introducing reference points through earmark provisions led to a substantial increase in the average number of parental leave days taken per man (the intensive margin) and an elevated likelihood that men would take any parental leave (the extensive margin). In comparison, responses to the financial incentives are modest. The effect of reference dependence was most pronounced immediately after the reforms but gradually declined as men's parental leave takeup increasingly exceeded the earmarked provision.Too Many Female Colleagues For Comfort? Men’s Tipping Behavior and Gender Segregation Across Workplaces.Women and men tend to work in different workplaces, and this gender segregation is an important contributor to the gender wage gap. This paper studies a new explanation for workplace gender segregation, namely that men leave the workplace when the share of women reaches a certain point. I draw on past research on occupation-level tipping to detect potential composition levels—tipping points—where the share of men in a workplace starts dropping discontinuously over time. This analysis uses Swedish register data for all small- and medium-size workplaces from 1986 to 2009 and is carried out separately by men's level of education (high or low). I find strong non-linear patterns for high-skilled men but not for low-skilled ones. The distribution of candidate tipping points for high-skilled workplaces is centered around 25% to 35% female. Using enlistment data, I find a significant decrease in men's cognitive and non-cognitive skills at tipping point. I draw on my empirical findings to show how compositional preferences can be built into a simple model of self-selection. The model explains the observed negative selection of men after a workplace has exceeded a critical tipping point. The result of this paper emphasizes the potential importance of the preferences of the dominant group.Occupational Gender Segregation and Men's Tipping Behavior: the Swedish Case.The division of occupations along gender lines seems to be a common and persistent feature between countries, despite differences in social norms and institutional settings across time. The aim of this paper is to investigate one possible explanation, namely tipping behaviour in occupations. It studies the non-linear dynamics of occupation segregation, applying an approach similar to regression discontinuity design. This paper studies tipping behaviour in the Swedish labour market from 1960 to 1990 and compares it to the results for the U.S. using an analogous methodology. The graphical approach exhibits a highly non-linear relationship in female share. I find candidate tipping points that range between 9 to 32 percent in female share. The results indicate discontinuous changes in net male employment growth at candidate tipping point.