Analyzing intersectional inequality with microeconometrics

Analyzing intersectional inequality with econometrics is a research project consisting of four individual academic papers to be published in high-quality scientific journals. Each paper investigates some element of social and economic inequality using the most modern microeconometric techniques. A key innovation of this project is that the research questions are all intersectional in nature: they study inequality along multiple lines of identity. Thus, the project goes beyond standard male versus female or native versus migrant analyses, and instead asks, for example, what the differential effects of being a migrant for men and women separately are. The now-staple concept of intersectionality comes from feminist theory, and says that people in different groups (e.g. men and women) experience other elements of identity (e.g. migration background) in different ways. Therefore, to understand the social and economic conditions of migrant women, for example, we cannot simply combine the effect of being a (non-migrant) woman with the effect of being a migrant man; migrant women have unique experiences from both of those groups. The four research questions are somewhat broad in nature, with the common threads of an intersectional understanding of identity and the application of modern microeconometrics on survey data. The first paper studies intergenerational educational persistence for men and women with and without a background of migration in twenty European countries. The fact that the study is conducted for many European countries means that we may be able to draw inference on the relevance of national social policy in promoting or stymieing equality of opportunity. The second paper uses a similar econometric technique to address the question of why lesbian and gay (LG) people are, on average, more highly educated than straight women and men. In particular, it tests whether the parents of LG people are more highly educated than those of straight parents, or if LG people are more educationally mobile and self-select into higher education, perhaps to protect themselves from discrimination. The paper addresses a puzzle of human capital investment in the literature on the economics of sexual orientation. The third paper in the research project uses matching techniques to study the effect of pre-school attendance on later educational attainment and earnings for men and women with and without a migration background in Austria. The paper makes an important contribution in studying how human capital investment can have varying effects for people in different socio-demographic groups. The fourth paper studies how motherhood may affect the wages of straight versus lesbian women differently. The paper offers insight into the well-known motherhood penalty, and suggests that it is social gender, not biological sex, which drives the motherhood wage penalty.

The project Analyzing Multidimensional Inequality with Microeconometrics shows that in various aspects of economic life, people face inequality based on a number of dimensions of their identity. The project studied how elements of identity such as gender, country of residence, migration background, marital status, and sexual orientation interact with each other to determine an individuals educational outcomes and wages. While people in one group might have relative success in one area of economic life, others in a different group that is similar on one dimension but not another may be less successful. The project thus shows how identity is multifaceted: each group comprises multiple subgroups that need to be studied as entities with their own unique experiences. One study in the project revealed that overall across Europe, second-generation immigrants are more likely than the children of native-born parents to have more education than their parents, but this result differed significantly across countries. The mobility gap between second-generation migrants and natives is highest in the UK and even negative in some Eastern European countries, where natives children are more mobile than the children of immigrants. A second study showed that all groups in Austria benefit from having attended preschool as a child. Those who went to preschool as children have higher wages, more years of education, and a higher rate of tertiary education completion as adults. However, some groups benefit more from having attended preschool. Second-generation immigrants and children of lower-educated parents benefit the most. Men see great returns to preschool in terms of their wages, while women benefit mainly in terms of their educational attainment. The projects third study revealed that both lesbians and gay men have higher levels of education than heterosexuals of the same gender. However, the reasons why this might be the case differs by gender. Both gay men and lesbians appear to choose to get more education because more education opens doors to jobs with more tolerant coworkers, but only lesbians seems to invest more in their own education based on expectations about later household income. Finally, the fourth study in the project analyzed the wage gap by sexual orientation and marital status. Lesbians earn more than straight women while gay men earn less than straight men, but these results differ by marital status. The wage penalty faced by gay men is larger for the group of married gay men than for the group of unmarried gay men the while wage premium for lesbians is smaller for the married group. Thus, being married seems to come at a cost in terms of wages for both lesbians and gay men. Overall, the findings in the project suggest that economic and social policy that attempts to assist a particular group (e.g. women or people with a migration background) ought to be more specific, recognizing that not all people in a broad group will have similar experiences, since they all belong to a number of smaller sub-groups.