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Essays on Gender Disparities in Earnings and Education
Zafrul Siddique
-Thesis Abstract-
My thesis consists of three essays on gender disparities in education and earnings.
My _rst essay, Shocks to Family Income and Gender Di_erences in Child Schooling
Responses in Rural India (Job Market Paper), looks at the intrahousehold allocation
of educational resources in response to income shocks with a particular focus on child gender
di_erences in rural India. By using data from the ICRISAT India village level survey, I exploit
seasonal variation in rainfall to identify the impact of exogenous income shocks on boys' and
girls' school hours. I show that child school hours are sensitive to income shocks, and girls'
schooling is lower and more sensitive to income shocks than that of boys. Moreover, schooling
of girls' from smaller farm households is more sensitive to income shocks, and gender di_erences
in school hours are statistically signi_cant only among children from these households. Smaller
farm households are more likely to be credit constrained and when faced with income shocks,
they take resources away from girls _rst in order to adjust to income shortfalls. This highlights
the importance of income shocks and potential credit constraints in generating the gender
education gap in India.
My second essay, Trends in Gender Wage Di_erentials and Selection Bias: 1975-
2000, analyzes how women's wages have fared relative to men's wages since 1975 in the US.
The question of whether observed wage changes reect true changes in opportunities is much
debated in the literature, because analyzing only observed wages excludes labor market non-
participants. I impute wages for non-workers based on a number of di_erent assumptions
about their potential wages using data from the March Current Population Surveys. Then, I
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