Content area
Abstract
This dissertation examines the effects of demographic and institutional change in Taiwan on wages and women's labor force participation between 1979 and 1998. Between 1979 and 1998, the education of Taiwan's population increased substantially, the manufacturing sector adopted more skill-intensive production technology and the occupational composition of the labor force shifted more toward white-collar work
The first chapter studies the effects of the increase in educational attainment and skill-biased technical chance on the returns to education. Educated workers from less-educated cohorts received a higher return to their education than their counterparts in more-educated cohorts throughout their time in the labor force. In later years, however, the wages of educated workers in the manufacturing sector increased in a way consistent with skill-biased technical change.
The second chapter examines the influence of changes in the age composition, skill-biased technical change and institutional characteristics of industries, like firm size and occupational composition, on individual wage inequality. Although wage inequality over-all did not change very much, it increased dramatically within agriculture and declined within manufacturing and social and personal services. A decomposition of the variance of logs measure of inequality reveals that the most important factor for agriculture was the aging of the agricultural labor force. The most important factor for manufacturing and social and personal services was a reduction in the return to skill brought about by an increase in the supply of young, skilled labor.
The third chapter analyzes the contribution of changes in cohort-specific occupational composition to changes in women's labor force participation. There is a higher probability of participation after marriage for women who were employed before marriage in white-collar occupations, as compared to those in blue-collar occupations. The former are also more likely to remain in the labor force in the presence of young children. Changes in occupational structure account for 30% of the observed increase in the female labor force participation rate from 1978 to 1998.
