The Price of Everything (42 page)

 

97-101 The New Mating Market:
The story about
The Quiverfull
was aired by National Public Radio on
Morning Edition
on March 25, 2009 (
www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102005062&ft=1&f=1001
, accessed 07/18/2010). Data on government pension replacement rates and their impact on fertility comes from Olivia S. Mitchell and John W. R. Phillips, “Social Security Replacement Rates for Alternative Earnings Benchmarks,” University of Michigan Retirement Research Center Working Paper, May 2006; and Francesco C. Billari and Vincenzo Galasso, “What Explains Fertility? Evidence from Italian Pension Reforms,” CEPR Discussion Paper, October 2008. Arguments about work’s impact on fertility in Europe are drawn from Bruce Sacerdote and James Feyrer, “Will the Stork Return to Europe and Japan? Understanding Fertility Within Developed Nations,” NBER Working Paper, June 2008; and Samuel Preston and Caroline Sten Hartnett, op. cit. Evidence of the financial benefits of marriage is found in Martin Browning, Pierre-André Chiappori, and Arthur Lewbel, “Estimating Consumption Economies of Scale, Adult Equivalence Scales, and Household Bargaining Power,” Economics Series Working Paper, Oxford University Department of Economics, August 2006; Graziella Bertocchi and Marianna Brunetti, “Marriage and Other Risky Assets: A Portfolio Approach,” CEPR Discussion Paper, February 2009; Libertad González and Berkay Özcan, “The Risk of Divorce and Household Saving Behavior,” IZA Working Paper, September 2008. Data on the relative earnings of husbands and wives are found in Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, “Annual Social and Economic Supplements, Table F-22: Married-Couple Families with Wives’ Earnings Greater Than Husbands’ Earnings: 1988 to 2008” (
www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/families/index.html
, accessed 07/18/ 2010). Data on increased marriage rates among college graduates come from Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson, “Marriage and Divorce, Changes and Their Driving Forces,”
Journal of Economic Perspectives
, Vol. 21, No. 2, Spring 2007, pp. 27-52; and Adam Isen and Betsey Stevenson, “Women’s Education and Family Behavior: Trends in Marriage, Divorce and Fertility,” NBER Working Paper, February 2010. Evidence of mothers’ recent change in attitudes toward work is found in Pew Research Center, “Fewer Mothers Prefer Full-time Work,” July 2007; and Sharon R. Cohany and Emy Sok, “Trends in Labor Force Participation of Married Mothers of Infants,”
Bureau of Labor Statistics Monthly Labor Review
, February 2007 (
www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2007/02/art2abs.htm
, accessed 08/08/2010). The data on American fertility are from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (
www.cdc.gov/nchs/births.htm
, accessed 07/18/2010). Data on growing numbers of forty-year-old mothers come from Claudia Goldin, personal communication.

 

101-104 The Cheapest Women:
Indian men’s preference for women from the same caste is discussed in Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Maitreesh Ghatak, and Jeanne Lafortune, “Marry for What? Caste and Mate Selection in Modern India,” NBER Working Paper, May 2009. The analysis of dowry payments in India and Bangladesh draws from Francis Bloch and Vijayendra Rao, “Terror as a Bargaining Instrument: A Case-Study of Dowry Violence in Rural India,”
American Economic Review
, Vol. 92, No. 4, September 2002, pp. 1029-1043; Siwan Anderson, “The Economics of Dowry and Brideprice,”
Journal of Economic Perspectives
, Vol. 21, No. 4, Fall 2007, pp. 151-174; Vijayendra Rao, “The Rising Price of Husbands: A Hedonic Analysis of Dowry Increases in Rural India,”
Journal of Political Economy
, Vol. 101, No. 4, 1993, pp. 666-671; Vijayendra Rao, “The Economics of Dowries in India,” in Kaushik Basu, ed.,
Oxford Companion to Economics in India
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Luciana Suran and Sajeda Amin, “Does Dowry Make Life Better for Brides? A Test of the Bequest Theory of Dowry in Rural Bangladesh,” Policy Research Division Working Paper, Population Council, New York, 2004.

 

104-106 Killing Girls:
The decline in the abortion of female fetuses in South Korea and the impact of ultrasound technology on such abortions in India are discussed in Woojin Chung and Monica Das Gupta, “The Decline of Son Preference in South Korea: The Roles of Development and Public Policy,”
Population and Development Review
, Vol. 33, No. 4, December 2007, pp. 757-783. Data on gender imbalances in South Korea and China are drawn from Monica Das Gupta, Jiang Zhenghua, Li Bohua, Xie Zhenming, Woojin Chung, and Bae Hwa-Ok, “Why Is Son Preference So Persistent in East and South Asia? A Cross-Country Study of China, India and the Republic of Korea,”
Journal of Development Studies
, Vol. 40, No. 2, December 2003, pp. 153-187; and “China Faces Growing Sex Imbalance,” BBC News, 01/11/2010 (at
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8451289.stm
, accessed 07/18/2010). Data on gender imbalances among Indian, Chinese, and Korean families in the United States are found in Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund, “Son-biased Sex Ratios in the 2000 United States Census,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
, Vol. 105, No. 15, April 15, 2008, pp. 5681-5682.

 

106-109 Missing Brides:
The discussion of the consequences of China’s gender imbalance draws from Avraham Ebenstein and Ethan Jennings, “The Consequences of the Missing Girls of China,”
World Bank Economic Review
, Vol. 23, No. 3, November 2009, pp. 399-425; “China Faces Growing Sex Imbalance,” BBC News, 01/11/2010 (at
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8451289.stm
, accessed 07/18/2010); Shang-Jin Wei and Xiaobo Zhang, “The Competitive Saving Motive: Evidence from Rising Sex Ratios and Savings Rates in China,” NBER Working Paper, June 2009. The analysis of the positive influence of women on development in China and Taiwan draws from “Women and Men in China, Facts and Figures, 2004,” Department of Population, Social Science, and Technology, National Bureau of Statistics, China, April 2004; Zhang Ye, “Hope for China’s Migrant Women Workers,”
China Business Review
, April 2002; Nancy Qian, “Missing Women and the Price of Tea in China: The Effect of Sex-Specific Earnings on Sex Imbalance,” CEPR Discussion Paper, December 2006; and Andrew M. Frances, “Sex Ratios and the Red Dragon: Using the Chinese Communist Revolution to Explore the Effect of the Sex Ratio on Women and Children in Taiwan,” Emory University Working Paper, November 2008.

 

110-114 The Price of Work:
Data on labor coercion are found in International Labor Organization, “The Cost of Coercion,” Report of the Director General, International Labour Conference, 2009. Data on the labor share of national income is drawn from Bureau of Economic Analysis, National Income and Product Accounts, Table 1.12: National Income by Type of Income. The analysis of the evolution of slavery through history draws from Jonathan Conning, “On the Causes of Slavery or Serfdom and the Roads to Agrarian Capitalism: Domar’s Hypothesis Revisited,” Hunter College Department of Economics Working Paper, City University of New York, November 2004; Nils-Petter Lagerlöf, “Slavery and Other Property Rights,”
Review of Economic Studies
, Vol. 76, No. 1, January 2009, pp. 319-342; Evsey Domar, “The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis,”
Economic History Review
, Vol. 30, No. 1, March 1970, pp. 18-32; Kevin O’Rourke and Ronald Findlay,
Power and Plenty: Trade, War and the World Economy in the Second Millennium
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 130; and Daron Acemoglu and Alexander Wolitzky, “The Economics of Labor Coercion,” NBER Working Paper, December 2009. Data on the impact of slavery on productivity and economic growth is drawn from Nathan Nunn, “Slavery, Inequality, and Economic Development in the Americas: An Examination of the Engerman-Sokoloff Hypothesis,” MPRA Paper, University Library of Munich, Germany, October 2007; Peter Mancall, Joshua Rosenbloom, and Thomas Weiss, “South Carolina Slave Prices, 1722-1809,” NBER Historical Paper, March 2000; Peter Mancall, Joshua Rosenbloom, and Thomas Weiss, “Agricultural Labor Productivity in the Lower South, 1720-1800,”
Explorations in Economic History
, Vol. 39, No. 4, October 2002, pp. 390-424. The impact of illegal immigration on capital investments in American agriculture is discussed in Eduardo Porter, “In Florida Groves, Cheap Labor Means Machines,”
New York Times
, March 22, 2004. Data on wages in Vietnam comes from Vu Trong Khanh and Leigh Murray, “Inflation Fears After Vietnam Boosts Wages,”
Wall Street Journal
, March 26, 2010.

 

114-118 What’s Fair Pay?:
Data on the cost of goods measured in terms of the average worker’s wage comes from United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, “100 Years of U.S. Consumer Spending: Data for the Nation, New York City, and Boston,” May 2006; J. Bradford Delong, “Cornucopia: Increasing Wealth in the Twentieth Century,” NBER Working Paper, March 2000. The value of speaking English in India is found in Mehtabul Azam, Aimee Chin, and Nishith Prakash, “The Returns to English-Language Skills in India,” IZA Discussion Paper, 2010. The discussion of the higher wages of the tall and the beautiful draws from Anne Case and Christina Paxson, “Stature and Status: Height, Ability, and Labor Market Outcomes,”
Journal of Political Economy
, Vol. 116, No. 3, 2008, pp. 499-532; Daniel Hammermesh and Jeff Biddle, “Beauty and the Labor Market,”
American Economic Review
, Vol. 84, 1994, pp. 1174-1194; and Peter Lundborg, Paul Nystedt, and Dan-Olof Rooth, “The Height Premium in Earnings: The Role of Physical Capacity and Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Skills,” IZA Working Paper, June 2009. The stories about George Eastman and Henry Ford’s labor policies are drawn from Sanford M. Jacobi,
Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism Since the New Deal
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); “Eastman Charted Path for Industry,”
New York Times
, March 15, 1932; Daniel Raff and Lawrence Summers, “Did Henry Ford Pay Efficiency Wages?”
Journal of Labor Economics
, Vol. 5, October 1987, pp. S57-86. The analysis of the number of American jobs that could be sent offshore is found in Alan Blinder and Alan Krueger, “Alternative Measures of Offshorability: A Survey Approach,” NBER Working Paper, August 2009. Chinese economic data comes from the International Monetary Fund (
www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2010/01/weodata/index.aspx
, accessed 08/09/2010) and the United Nations Millennium Indicators (at
mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/Default.aspx
, accessed 08/09/2010). Data on unionization in the United States comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (
www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm
, accessed 07/18/2010); and Barry Hirsch and David Macpherson,
Union Membership and Earnings Data Book
(Arlington, Va.: The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc., 2010).

 

118-121 Paying Superman:
Data on pay in Major League Baseball are drawn from the
USA Today
baseball salary database (
content.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/salaries/default.aspx
, accessed 07/18/2010). Data on corporate pay is drawn from Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-1998,”
Quarterly Journal of Economics,
Vol. 118, 2003, pp. 1-39, updated tables and figures (at
elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/TabFig2010.xls
, accessed 07/18/2010); Carola Frydman and Raven Saks, “Executive Compensation: A New View from a Long-Term Perspective, 1936-2005,” NBER Working Paper, June 2008, Table 3; and Xavier Gabaix and Augustin Landier, “Why Has CEO Pay Increased so Much?,” NYU Working Paper, 2006. Sherwin Rosen’s analysis is in Sherwin Rosen, “The Economics of Superstars,”
American Economic Review
, Vol. 71, No. 5, December 1981, pp. 845-858. The analysis of the fast growth of earnings at the top in pop music, Hollywood, and soccer draws from Alan Krueger, “The Economics of Real Superstars: The Market for Rock Concerts in the Material World,”
Journal of Labor Economics
, Vol. 23, January 2005, pp. 1-30; the IMDB database (at
www.imdb.com/name/nm0000129/bio
and
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120755/
, accessed 07/18/2010); Edward Jay Epstein, “Tom Cruise Inc.: The Numbers Behind His Celebrity,”
Slate
, June 27, 2005; Claudia Eller, “Tom Cruise Sees Box Office Share Scaled Back,”
Los Angeles Times
, February 17, 2010; Matthew Saltmarsh, “European Soccer Revenue Climbs, but So Do Salaries,”
New York Times
, June 8, 2010; Garry Jenkins,
The Beautiful Team
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006);
Futebolfinance.com
; Christina Settimi, “Soccer’s Highest Earners,”
Forbes.com
, April 21, 2010; and Fédération Internationale de Football Association (
www.fifa.com/aboutfifa/marketing/factsfigures/tvdata.html
). Data on the earnings of the richest families comes from Piketty and Saez, op. cit.

 

121-125 Farmers and Financiers:
Data on bankers’ bonuses come from the office of the Comptroller of New York State (
www.osc.state.ny.us/press/releases/feb10/bonus_chart_2009.pdf
, accessed 07/18/2010.) Data on banks’ profits drawn from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (
www.bea.gov
). Faylene Whitacker’s comments about immigrant laborers are in Eduardo Porter, “Who Will Work the Farms?”
New York Times
, March 23, 2006. Data on international migration is drawn from the Migration Policy Institute (
www.migrationinformation.org/datahub/charts/6.1.shtml
. , accessed 07/18/2010). Data on growing inequality in China are in Anthony B. Atkinson, Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez, “Top Incomes in the Long Run of History,” NBER working paper, October 2009. Analysis on the impact of inequality on economic growth draws from Dan Andrews, Christopher Jencks, and Andrew Leigh, “Do Rising Top Incomes Lift All Boats?,” Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Management Working Paper, 2009. Data on economic growth per person in the United States is from the International Monetary Fund (
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2010/01/weodata/weorept.aspx?pr.x=37&pr.y=12&sy=1980&ey=2015&scsm=1&ssd=1&sort=country&ds=.&br=1&c=111&s=NGDPRPC%2CNGDPPC&grp=0&a=
, accessed 08/09/2010). International comparisons of inequality are found in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development,
Growing Unequal? Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries
(OECD Publishing, October 2008), pp. 77-92. Data on the impact of income inequality on health and segregation are drawn from Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett,
The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better
(New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010); and Joseph Gyourko, Christopher Mayer, and Todd Sinai, “Superstar Cities,” NBER Working Paper, July 2006.