Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Return To Work Credits, Joshua S. Gans

Joshua S Gans

This report examines policy options for parental leave and evaluates them from an economics perspective. It finds that:

The goal of parental leave policy is to facilitate a frictionless transition between work/career activities and home/parental activities.

There are several potential market failures that could be generated that mean that private decisions with regard to parental leave do not reflect their social counter-parts. The sources of these market failures are liquidity constraints and indivisibilities in work and home tasks. The consequences may be an under-provision of parental leave from a child development perspective as well as a sub-optimal allocation of workers …

Credit Access, The Costs Of Credit And Credit Market Discrimination, Christian E. Weller

PERI Working Papers

Since the early 1990s, credit expanded relative to income, especially after 2001. It is hypothesized that traditionally uneven credit access and gaps in the costs of credit by demographic characteristics shrank during this period. Relying on data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finance, this study looks at financial constraints, the costs of credit and a number of contributions to the costs of credit, including sources and types of loans. The results indicate that taste-based discrimination and structural discrimination may have persisted and possibly increased over time. Gaps in credit access and costs of credit have widened by race, …

Endogenous Categorization In Insurance, Mattias K. Polborn

Mattias K Polborn

This paper analyzes the welfare properties of equilibrium when insurers use observable actions to classify consumers into different risk categories, and consumers' choice is influenced by the insurance market consequences of their actions. Specifically, we analyze this problem at the example of a car insurance market, in which individual preferences over car types are correlated with risk type and used by insurance firms for ratemaking. Equilibrium premiums for each car are determined by the losses that it generates. Consumers take insurance premiums into account when deciding which car to buy. This creates an incentive to buy the car that is …

What Counts As 'Discrimination' In Ledbetter And The Implications For Sex Equality Law, Deborah L. Brake

Articles

This article, presented at a Symposium, The Roberts Court and Equal Protection: Gender, Race and Class held at the University of South Carolina School of Law in the Spring of 2008, explores the implications of the Supreme Court's decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. for sex equality law more broadly, including equal protection. There is more interrelation between statutory and constitutional equality law as a source of discrimination protections than is generally acknowledged. Although the Ledbetter decision purports to be a narrow procedural ruling regarding the statute of limitations for Title VII pay discrimination claims, at its …