The Impact of Welfare on Wage Rate, Market Work Hours and Income—an Empirical Study

• Main Authors: Zheng-Ge Yang, 楊政格
• Other Authors: Zi-Ling Huang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2004
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/4wawjg

碩士 === 中原大學 === 國際貿易研究所 === 92 === According to Becker (1985), married women spend much more <a href="http://www.ntsearch.com/search.php?q=time&v=56">time</a> on chores like housework and child care than married men. Hence, women don’t have much <a href="http://www.ntsearch.com/search.php?q=time&v=56">time</a> on their work. In this consideration, employers are not willing to pay women an equal earning compared to men with the same human capital. If it’s the case, some welfare like <a href="http://www.ntsearch.com/search.php?q=nursing&v=56">nursing</a> on child care will be able to relieve <a href="http://www.ntsearch.com/search.php?q=family&v=56">family</a> pressure and increase employees’ efforts on their work. This paper intends to investigate how the <a href="http://www.ntsearch.com/search.php?q=nursing&v=56">nursing</a> welfare helps employees. In order to investigate whether the <a href="http://www.ntsearch.com/search.php?q=nursing&v=56">nursing</a> welfare has a positive effect on employees in the way of increasing their earning, we uses cross section and panel data from Panel Study of <a href="http://www.ntsearch.com/search.php?q=Family&v=56">Family</a> Dynamics (PSFD) to estimate earning , wage and market hour equations and try to analyze whether welfare and other variables are affecting earning through wage rate or market hour. Empirically, we apply Heckman two-stage estimation and two-stage least squares (2SLS) to correct possible bias in the equations. From the 2SLS estimation, surprisingly, we found that there is negative relationship between the <a href="http://www.ntsearch.com/search.php?q=nursing&v=56">nursing</a> welfare index and the earning. The result may arise from some factors other than welfare because the price level of the country with higher welfare index is lower. The employees working in the country with lower price level don’t have as much earning as the employees living in the cities with lower welfare index. It’s one of the possible reasons to explain the result from the empirical data. Besides, most human capital variables like age, housework, spouse’s earning and tenure are likely to affecting employees’ earning through their wage rate instead of work hour. This implies that employees’ work hour isn’t easily to be changed so most variables are affecting earning through wage rate. Among all the variables used in this paper, we found spouse’s housework hour is the only one to affect employees’ earning through their work hour. In contrast to the other variables, spouse’s housework is the most sensitive variable to affect employees’ work hour. Hence, it is important to consider the factor of spouse’s housework to affect the employees’ work hour.