Yixuan Li's Thesis of Three Chapters

Abstract

The first chapter examines how Ban-the-box policies affect employment outcome of females. While the previous literature finds that minority males are hurt by Ban-the-box policies, no one has focused on females. I fill this gap by using individual level employment status data to examine the influence of Ban-the-box policies on females by initial employment status. I find that relative to non-Hispanic white females, Hispanic females who started outside the labor force experience a lower probability of being employed or entering the labor force after pubic bans.The second chapter examines whether changes in temperature affects gender differentials in time allocation and the potential mechanisms through which this response might operate. Based on data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), we find that, relative to men, women decrease their labor supply by approximately one hour during days with temperatures of 100 degrees Fahrenheit or higher, despite having fewer working hours than men over the entire distribution of temperature. However, the differences in the time allocated to housework and leisure between men and women vary little with temperature. Our further investigation suggests that a substantial part of the gender gap in response to temperature is attributed to family status and fertility status. The third chapter investigates whether higher housing prices cause parents to be less willing to have boys. Over the past two decades, Chinese males have been competing in marriage markets by offering to purchase homes when getting married. The rise in housing prices has made this practice increasingly expensive, and may help explain why the sex ratio of new-born babies in China has declined since 2008. Using aggregated data at the city level, I find that higher housing price are associated with lower male-to-female ratio of new-born babies, confirming that higher housing price do weaken Chinese parents’ son preference. The mechanism is that higher housing price combined with the custom for the bride to provide a house significantly increases the cost of nurturing a son while the return does not increase much. So parents are less willing to having a son compared with having a daughter.