Abstract
This chapter analyzes the effects of children, among other variables, on the labor supply of Jewish and non-Jewish white women, using the data on adult white second-generation Americans in the 1970 Census. The Jewish identifier is reporting speaking a typically Jewish “mother tongue” as a child. Three measures of labor supply are considered.
Jewish women have a lower labor supply than other women if there are any children under age 6 in the home. Children age 6–18 have a greater depressing effect on their labor supply than on that of non-Jewish women. Jewish women without children at home are more likely to work. The favorable effect of schooling attainment on labor supply is greater for Jewish women. These patterns for second-generation Jewish women are independent of their parents’ country of birth and the Jewish identifier language (Yiddish or Hebrew).
These labor supply patterns suggest that Jewish women are less likely to work when their children are “time intensive” and more likely to work when there are no children or when their children are “goods intensive,” suggesting a more optimal investment in child quality. The schooling effect indicates that Jewish women are more sensitive to the labor supply effects of incentives to work.
This is s revision of original article published in Contemporary Jewry, 9(2), Fall 1988, pp. 35–61. I appreciate the research assistance of Suchittra Chamnivichorn and the comments received from Carmel U. Chiswick, Donald Cox, Marianne Ferber and Evelyn Lehrer and at seminars at Queens University, Stanford University, University of California at Santa Barbara, and University of Illinois at Chicago. This paper was presented at a joint session of the annual meetings of the Association for Jewish Studies and the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry, Boston, December 1985.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Other studies of the time devoted to child care include Gronau (1976), Hill and Stafford (1974, 1980) and Hunt and Kiker (1981). These studies find that time devoted to child care, particularly “educational care,” rises with the level of parent’s education. Other studies have found that greater parental time inputs (measured by mother’s labor supply and marital status) raise the schooling and earnings of the child. See, for example, Fleisher (1977), Krein (1984) and Stafford (1985). Time budget studies for the U.S. have small sample sizes, far too small for studies of racial, ethnic or religious minorities’ differences in investment in child quality.
- 3.
The notable exception, the Supplement to the March 1957 Current Population Survey, will be discussed below.
- 4.
This is also a limiting feature of the Canadian and Australian Censuses which ask religion and identify Jews.
- 5.
This procedure cannot be used in the 1980 Census which had a retrospective question on “mother tongue” and none on parents’ nativity. Responses to the 1980 Census “ancestry” question which revealed the person’s religion were recoded to mask religion (i.e., a response of “Jewish” was coded as “other,” Polish Jew” as Polish,” etc.).
- 6.
For a comparison of the Jews identified by this procedure and persons who self-reported themselves as Jews in the 1970–71 National Jewish Population Survey, see Kobrin (1983).
- 7.
Some tests for adult Jewish men suggest that there are no systematic differences in earnings among the Yiddish, Hebrew and Ladino speakers and that although the proportion of non-identified Jews would be expected to vary by country of origin (i.e., higher for Britain and Canada and Western Europe, lower for Poland and Russia), there were no variations in male Jewish earnings by country of origin (Chiswick 1983). Tests reported below indicate that among Jewish women labor supply does not vary by mother tongue or parent’s country of birth. These tests suggest that the “mother tongue” procedure does not produce biased estimates of regression coefficients for second generation American Jews. See also Kobrin (1983).
- 8.
Linear regressions are computed to keep the structures similar across the dependent variables and because logarithms cannot be computed for those with a zero value for the labor supply variable or for dichotomous explanatory variables.
- 9.
For a theoretical and empirical analysis of the effects of children on the value of the mother’s time in home production, see Gronau (1974).
- 10.
Productivity in home production may also rise with education and age, but these partial effects are likely to be much smaller than their impacts on market wages (Michael 1972).
- 11.
The only exception is that residence in a rural area (only 2.4 percent of the Jewish women) is not associated with a lower labor supply among Jewish women.
- 12.
Higher market returns from schooling may reflect greater parental investment in their stock of home-produced human capital.
- 13.
The benchmark can be changed from all non-Jews to British Isles non-Jews by adding dichotomous parent’s country of birth variables for non-Jews. When that is done there are essentially no changes in the Jewish coefficients or t-ratios in the pooled regressions. Of the country categories (see Table 11.4), the only significant differences are for those of Mexican and Canadian origins. For each measure of labor supply women of these origins work more than those of British origin, ceteris paribus:
Canaunz stands for Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, most of whom were Canadian.
- 14.
Catsiapis and Robinson (1981) show that among unmarried post secondary school students, Jewish students receive larger financial contributions from their parents than do other students, even after controlling for their family income and receipt of scholarships and grants. Chiswick and Cox (1986) show that groups that anticipate lower rates of return from schooling (e.g., Blacks and Hispanics compared to non-Hispanic whites) make smaller inter vivos transfers to their college-age children. This would be consistent with both the higher observed rate of return from schooling for Jewish men and greater parental transfers when they are college age.
- 15.
Catholic married women have a much larger number of children than Jewish women. The number of children ever born per woman aged 15–44 years (standardized by age), by religion in March 1957:
- 16.
This interpretation provides insights regarding racial and ethnic group differences among adult men in schooling, earnings, and employment. For example, several studies using different data files have shown that, other things the same, black women have higher labor force participation rates than white women, and that their participation rates decline by much less when there are young children in the home. (See, for example, Bowen and Finegan (1969), Bell (1974), and Lehrer and Nerlove (1984).)
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Chiswick, B.R. (2020). Labor Supply and Investment in Child Quality: A Study of Jewish and Non-Jewish Women. In: Chiswick, B. (eds) Jews at Work. Studies of Jews in Society, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41243-2_11
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