Research

Discussion Papers

Her Job, her Safety? Domestic Violence and Women's Economic Empowerment: Evidence from Ethiopia

Abstract: Domestic violence against women is a pervasive public health problem in all countries regardless of cultural, economic, and political background. Yet, the distribution of domestic violence is very high in Sub-Saharan Africa. In this paper, I examine the effect of women's employment on domestic violence using the Demographic and Health Survey in Ethiopia. To address the endogeneity of women’s employment decisions due to reverse causality, the study employs an Instrumental Variables approach by exploiting exogenous geographical variation of women’s employment rate at the community level. Moreover, the estimation accounts for the characteristics of socioeconomic and climate variations at the community level using external geospatial satellite information. After accounting for the endogeneity issue, the estimation result shows that women's employment significantly reduces the risk of domestic violence. This result holds robust across different dimensions of domestic violence such as physical, sexual, and emotional violence, and for urban and rural places of residence. R & R at Journal of Applied Economics. GLO Discussion Paper, No 1436. Link

Occupational Segregation and the Gender Wage Gap: Evidence from Ethiopia

Abstract:  This paper examines the role of female occupational segregation on the gender wage gap across the entire wage distribution. Using the Ethiopian labor force survey, I employ unconditional quantile regression based on the recentered influence function and correct sample selection issues that arise due to the nonrandom decision of female labor force participation using Heckman’s two-stage method for baseline estimation. The results show that women earn less than men throughout the wage distribution, even after controlling for personal and labor market characteristics. Importantly, female occupational segregation has a negative coefficient across the wage distribution except at the end of the distribution and partly explains the gender wage gap at the bottom and median percentile of the wage distribution. Using the recentered influence function decomposition, I find that the gender wage gap due to structural effect is highest at the bottom of the wage distribution, evidence of sticky floor effects. Finally, the estimation shows that the gender wage gap is higher in the private sector than in the public sector across the wage distribution. GLO Discussion Paper, No. 1393. Link

Immigrants and Trade Union Membership: Does Integration into Society and Workplace Play a Moderating Role?

(Coauthored  with Uwe Jirjahn)

Abstract: We hypothesize that incomplete integration into the workplace and society implies that immigrants are less likely to be union members than natives. Incomplete integration makes the usual mechanism for overcoming the collective action problem less effective. Using data from the Socio-Economic Panel, our empirical analysis confirms a unionization gap for first-generation immigrants in Germany. Importantly, the analysis shows that the immigrant-native gap in union membership indeed depends on immigrants' integration into the workplace and society. The gap is smaller for immigrants working in firms with a works council and having social contacts with Germans. Our analysis also confirms that the gap is decreasing in the years since arrival in Germany. 

IZA Discussion Paper No. 15587. Link

The Labor Market Integration of Refugees and Other Migrants in Germany

Abstract: Using the panel data from 1995 to 2019, this paper investigates the labor market integration of non-EU immigrants in Germany. The existing evidence shows that the economic outcomes of migrants are far behind natives. However, immigrants are a heterogeneous group in terms of their motives for migration and skills composition. In this paper, I disentangle immigrants into refugees and other migrants and compare the employment probability gap between refugees, other migrants, and natives. I also examine whether refugees have a lower employment outcome than other migrants. The result confirms that refugees and other migrants are less likely to be employed than natives and the employment gap is much higher for refugees. I also find evidence of heterogeneity across gender. Other migrant men do not significantly differ from native men in the probability of being employed. In contrast, refugee women have an economic disadvantage than other migrant women and native women. I find no evidence that health status differences attribute to the employment gap between refugees, other migrants, and natives. Finally, this paper highlights the importance of the migration category when assessing the integration of immigrants into the labor market. GLO Discussion Paper, No. 884. Link

Publications

Her Job, her Safety? Domestic Violence and Women's Economic Empowerment: Evidence from Ethiopia

Journal of Applied Economics, Volume 28, No. 1. Link

Immigrants and Trade Union Membership: Does Integration into Society and Workplace Play a Moderating Role? British Journal of Industrial Relations Volume 62, Issue 2. Link