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Title: The Opt-In Revolution? Contraception and the Gender Gap in Wages
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Bailey, Martha J. Hershbein, Brad Miller, Amalia Rebecca |
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The Opt-In Revolution? Contraception and the Gender Gap in Wages Working Paper No. 17922. National Bureau of Economic Research, March 2012. Also: http://www.nber.org/papers/w17922 Cohort(s): Young Women Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Keyword(s): Career Patterns; Contraception; Gender; Gender Differences; Human Capital; Wage Rates; Wages; Women Decades of research on the U.S. gender gap in wages describes its correlates, but little is known about why women changed their career paths in the 1960s and 1970s. This paper explores the role of “the Pill” in altering women’s human capital investments and its ultimate implications for life-cycle wages. Using state-by-birth-cohort variation in legal access to contraception, we show that younger access to the Pill conferred an 8-percent hourly wage premium by age fifty. Our estimates imply that the Pill can account for 10 percent of the convergence of the gender gap in the 1980s and 30 percent in the 1990s. |
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Bibliography Citation
Bailey, Martha J., Brad Hershbein and Amalia Rebecca Miller. "The Opt-In Revolution? Contraception and the Gender Gap in Wages." Working Paper No. 17922. National Bureau of Economic Research, March 2012. |