Suchergebnisse

There is significant heterogeneity in actual skill use within occupations even though occupations are differentiated by the task workers should perform during work. Using data on 12 countries which are available both in the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies survey and International Social Survey Program, we show that women use their cognitive skills less than men even within the same occupation. The gap in skill intensity cannot be explained by differences in worker characteristics or in cognitive skills. Instead, we show that living in a partnership significantly increases the skill use of men compared with women. We argue that having a partner affects skill use through time allocation as the gender penalty of partnered women is halved once we control for working hours and hours spent on housework. Finally, we do not find evidence of workplace discrimination against women.

In November 2005, the Hungarian government frontloaded the unemployment benefit path, while kept constant the total benefit amount that could be collected over the unemployment spell. We estimate the effect of this reform on non-employment duration using an interrupted time series design. We find that non-employment duration fell by 1.5 weeks after November 2005, while reemployment wages and the duration of new jobs remained the same. We show that the decrease in non-employment duration was large enough to make the benefit reform revenue neutral. Our welfare evaluation for this reform is positive: frontloading increased job finding, it made some of the unemployed better off, and did not cost anything to the taxpayers.