Essays on Gender Gaps in Labor Market Outcomes and Time Allocation: Evidence from South Korea
This dissertation comprises three chapters focusing on gender gaps in both labor market outcomes and time allocation. The first chapter examines mothers’ relative labour market outcomes around the first childbirth in South Korea, a country with the highest gender pay gaps and the lowest fertility rate among the OECD countries. Using an event study approach, we find that while fathers remain unaffected, mothers’ earnings drop sharply by 66.2 per cent over the long run, mostly driven by a reduction in labour force participation. For women who continue to work, motherhood lowers the probability of entering male-dominated occupations and industries but increases the probability of working in female-dominated occupations and industries. Finally, we find that motherhood has a stronger negative effect on labour market outcomes for less-educated mothers, young mothers, mothers who first bear children within two years of marriage, and mothers with three or more children. Despite an increase in female labor force participation over the last decade, the gender gap in labor supply between married men and women has been persistent in South Korea. The second chapter investigates the gender gap in labor supply with a focus on education and spousal earnings in explaining the gap using the decomposition analysis. Endowment difference in the level of education between married men and women increases gender gap in participation. Yet, its adverse effect has decreased over time with Korean women’s equal or even higher access to education. We also highlight spousal earnings as an important explanation for the unchanged gender gap in labor supply. Our result implies that intra-household equality in earnings may lead to gender equality in labor supply and vice versa. Consistent with other studies in the context of Asian countries, a large portion of the gender gap in labor supply in South Korea remains unexplained. While women have made notable progress in labor market outcomes over the past decade, the unequal distribution of household labor persists. In the third chapter, I analyze the impact of spousal relative income on gender disparities in time allocation among dual-earner couples with children, using matched data from the Korean Time Use Survey and Korean Labor and Income Panel Study in 2004, 2009, 2014, and 2019. As a potentially exogenous measure of wives’ relative income, I construct a Bartik-style instrument that utilizes region-specific labor demand shocks by interacting variations in preexisting industry employment shares and provincewide earnings growth for each industry, excluding the focal area. The results suggest that when the share of earnings contributed by wives increases by one standard deviation, the time gap in housework between husbands and wives decreases by 24 minutes per day. Additionally, as the wives’ earnings increase, husbands and wives allocate more time to care work, mostly childcare.