Browsing by Person "Osikominu, Aderonke"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6

Are sociocultural factors important for studying a science university major?
(2015) Grossmann, Volker; Osikominu, Aderonke; Osterfeld, Marius
This paper examines the role of the sociocultural background of students for choosing STEM fields in university. We combine rich survey data on university graduates in Switzerland with municipality level information from the census as well as nationwide elections and referenda to characterize a students home environment with respect to religious and political attitudes towards gender equality and science-related issues. Our empirical estimates are based on a structural Roy model which accounts for differences in costs (relative distance to the next technical university) and earnings across majors as well as for selection bias. Our findings suggest that male students from conservative municipalities are more likely to study a STEM field, whereas the sociocultural background plays little role for the major choice of females.
Essays on gender differences in pay
(2024) Satlukal, Sascha; Osikominu, Aderonke
The three empirical studies underlying this dissertation all deal with the gender difference in pay. In particular, they analyze gender differences in expectations and aspirations about wages as well as beliefs about job insecurity and job finding chances and their effect on the observed wage inequality between women and men. In the first research article I evaluate, together with Stephanie Briel, Aderonke Osikominu, Gregor Pfeifer, and Mirjam Stockburger, wage expectations of prospective university students. For this analysis, we exploit a survey among applicants at Saarland University in Germany. The survey primarily asks respondents about their expectations of their own starting salary when entering the labor market as well as about their expectations regarding the average starting salary of other students in their study field. In a first step, we estimate unexplained gender gaps at various quantiles of the conditional and unconditional distribution of respondents' expected own salary and expected average salary. Our results reveal sizable gender differences across the distributions of both expected salaries. Based on the quantile regressions, the wage expectations of females are 5 to 15 percent lower than those of males. Yet, the gender gaps are more pronounced in case of the expected own salary. Likewise, the gender gaps are larger at the lower end of the wage expectation distributions. In the next step, we decompose the raw gender gaps at unconditional quantiles and document that a substantial portion of the gaps can be attributed to the choice of the study field. In the last step, we compute two measurements of biased beliefs and study their role in explaining the gender gap in wage expectations. The first measurement compares students' perceptions of their own earning potential relative to other students in their field of study to their relative performance in high school. The second measurement confronts students' expectations about the average starting salary to observed starting salaries of university graduates. We show that biased beliefs about the relative earnings potential and average salaries together can explain a large part of the gender gap across the distribution of expected own salaries. Thus, our study contributes to the literature by highlighting that biased beliefs are major drivers of the gender gap in wage expectations. In the second research article Marina Töpfer and I analyze gender differences in reservation wages of non-employed job seekers. To do so, we use survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study which asks non-employed participants about their monthly reservation wage and their intended weekly working hours. Based on the reported monthly reservation wages and intended working hours we compute the hourly reservation wage of individuals and find that women in our sample set 3 percent lower reservation wages compared to men. Next, we estimate the unexplained gender gap in reservation wages with a variety of parametric and semiparametric estimators. In addition, we use conventional as well as data-driven model specifications for the estimation. Hence, we can compare the results of different estimation approaches. All of our estimates of the unexplained gender gap suggest that women set lower reservation wages than men with similar observed characteristics. The estimates are all statistically significant and range between 5 and 8 percent. Comparing the different estimates of the unexplained gender gap we see that our estimate is relatively robust with regard to the model specifications, but is more sensitive to the choice of the estimator. Furthermore, we assess heterogeneity of the gender gap across the reservation wage distribution and with regard to characteristics such as marital status, children, and education. Our findings indicate that the gender gap in reservation wages is particularly pronounced at the top of the reservation wage distribution, among the high-skilled, and among individuals who live in a household with a child. In the third research article I investigate gender differences in beliefs about job insecurity and job finding chances and their consequences for the gender gaps in wages and reservation wages. To address this research question, I again utilize date from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study, which provides information on individuals' perceptions of their job insecurity or their chances of finding a job. Whereas employed respondents are asked how likely it is that they lose their job within the next two years, unemployed respondents are asked how likely it is that they find a job within the next two years. As the first step of my analysis, I compare these subjective beliefs to objective probabilities that I predict with machine learning methods using a large set of predictors. I find that employed individuals considerably overestimate the probability of a job loss on average, while unemployed individuals slightly overestimate the probability of finding a job. But, women are significantly more pessimistic with regard to both expectations compared to men. These gender differences in beliefs do also persist when I control for a large set of observed characteristics. Subsequently, I relate the job loss expectations to wages of employees and the job finding expectations to reservation wages of unemployed job seekers. My results suggest a negative relationship between job loss expectations and wages on the one hand, and a positive relationship between job finding expectations and reservation wages on the other hand. Finally, I estimate the effect of the gender differences in the beliefs to the gender gaps in wages and reservation wages and find a small positive contribution in both cases. But, only the contribution of job loss expectations to the gender gap in wages is statistically significant. In addition, I demonstrate that the effect of job loss expectation to wages is larger for workers without a collectively agreed wage and for college graduates.
Essays on tackling economic inequalities
(2016) Fuchs, Benjamin; Osikominu, Aderonke
This thesis provides a differentiated picture of two interventions and one policy reform to alleviate economic inequality. In two chapters this dissertation examines whether out-of-school activities affect behavioral outcomes reflecting character, social and executive function skills. The first essay in this thesis analyzes the effect of performing sports on a regular basis on the formation of character and social skills. The findings confirm that sports is generally a social activity. For youths from less advantaged family backgrounds sports constitutes often the only quality pastime they engage in. Athletic involvement has beneficial effects on a broad range of character skills. These effects are largely driven by youths who do not engage in any other structured activity. Further, the effects can be interpreted as a broader effect of having access to an enriched social environment. The second essay examines the effect of working part-time while attending full-time schooling on the development of character skills and occupational choice strategies. Comparing adolescents who hold a job with adolescents who do not work, the former spend less time in front of a screen and invest more time in academic learning. Focusing on the time use of employed adolescents, working part-time has an ambivalent effect on time invested in other activities. It reduces their homework time as well as their nonproductive screen time. The results imply that holding a paid job while still in school reduces the uncertainty about own interests and talents and reduces the dependency on parents. A third essay evaluates the impact of the Tenancy Law Reform Act in 2001, a policy which targets to protect especially low-income households against rent increase. Germany is one of the European countries with the highest percentage of the population who lives in tenancies. This illustrates the importance of a functioning tenancy law, socially and economically. This essay analyzes the effect of the reform on the level of rents as well as on the residency discount. The two substantial parts of the reform were the reduction of the maximum rent increases for sitting tenants and the reduction of the minimum notice period until termination of a tenancy by the tenant. Estimating the effect over the distribution of rents, the reform shows a significant negative effect on rents that is stronger at higher quantiles. The annual residency discount increases with the reform during the first three years of a tenancy and vanishes thereafter. The evidence suggests that the reform was successful in curtailing rent increases especially for expensive apartments early in a tenancy. This thesis provides a differentiated picture on how economic inequalities can be alleviated. On the one side, this thesis focuses on the formation of character skills which are helpful for bringing especially unskilled people into employment and to better paid jobs. On the other side, this thesis focuses on a tenancy law reform that targeted to protect tenants against rent increases. While beneficial effects of structured leisure activities on the formation of character skills can be detected, one may be concerned that the tenancy law reform may not have been sufficiently targeted if considering the target of the reform to protect especially low-income households against rent increases.
Overconfidence and gender differences in wage expectations
(2020) Satlukal, Sascha; Reuter, Mirjam; Pfeifer, Gregor; Osikominu, Aderonke; Briel, Stephanie
We analyze the impact of (over-)confidence on gender differences in expected start-ing salaries using elicited beliefs of prospective university students in Germany. According to our results, female students have lower wage expectations and are less overconfident than their male counterparts. Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions of the mean show that 7.7% of the gender gap in wage expectations is attributable to a higher overconfidence of males. Decompositions of the unconditional quantiles of expected salaries suggest that the contribution of gender differences in confidence to the gender gap is particularly strong at the bottom and top of the wage expectation distribution.
Perceived wages and the gender gap in STEM fields
(2018) Pfeifer, Gregor; Osikominu, Aderonke
We estimate gender differences in elicited wage expectations among German Uni- versity students applying for STEM and non-STEM fields. Descriptively, women expect to earn less than men and also have lower expectations about wages of average graduates across different fields. Using a two-step estimation procedure accounting for self-selection, we find that the gender gap in own expected wages can be explained to the extent of 54-69% by wage expectations for average graduates across different fields. However, gender differences in the wage expectations for average graduates across different fields do not contribute to explaining the gender gap in the choice of STEM majors.
Three essays on causal inference in education and health
(2025) Ruberg, Tim; Osikominu, Aderonke
This dissertation presents three essays on the causal impact of education and health programs in different countries. In the first essay, co-authored by Aderonke Osikominu and Gregor Pfeifer, I use individual-level data for Switzerland to estimate the causal effect of a STEM university degree on wages, allowing for heterogeneous returns to observed and unobserved characteristics. In the second essay, co-authored by Hideo Akabayashi, Chizuru Shikishima, and Jun Yamashita, I exploit a unique feature of the Japanese preschool system to estimate the causal effect of an education-oriented against a care-oriented preschool on children’s cognitive and socioemotional development in adolescence. In the third essay, co-authored by Lester Lusher, I investigate the impacts of a public warning system for extreme heat events on behavioral and health outcomes in Japan. 1st Essay: Characterizing Returns to STEM: Evidence on Marginal and Policy-Relevant Treatment Effects (with Aderonke Osikominu and Gregor Pfeifer) Most developed countries have been fostering education in the STEM field to increase innovation. In this study, we estimate heterogeneous returns to a STEM education in Switzerland based on individual-level data, exploiting the regional distribution of relative distances to technical and cantonal universities as a cost factor driving college major choice. A clear setting in the 1990s where prospective students could freely choose universities and majors allows us to exploit the regional distribution of technical and cantonal universities for identification in an instrumental variable framework. On average, individuals strongly gain in terms of wages from a STEM education. Descending Marginal Treatment Effect (MTE) curves suggest positive selection on gains, implying that individuals with a low resistance for a STEM education gain the most. This positive selection is driven by both heterogeneity in the returns to a non-STEM education as well as a STEM education. By simulating affirmative action policies that increase STEM enrollment and estimating corresponding policy-relevant treatment effects (PRTEs), we show that the effectiveness of such policies strongly depends on who is affected and, thus, on their observable and unobservable characteristics. We also show how such policies must be designed to increase STEM enrollment and benefit targeted individuals, most importantly, women. 2nd Essay: Education-Oriented and Care-Oriented Preschools: Implications on Child Develop-ment (with Hideo Akabayashi, Chizuru Shikishima, and Jun Yamashita) It is well known that experiences in early childhood are critical in shaping children's cognitive and noncognitive development. This paper estimates the causal effect of education-oriented vs. care-oriented preschools on child development. In Japan, parents can freely choose to send their children into either an education-oriented preschool (i.e. kindergarten) or a care-oriented preschool (i.e. nursery school). Education-oriented preschools are half-day facilities that provide about four hours educational instruction per day, while care-oriented preschools are full-day facilities that provide care for parents who are unable to provide care for their child for work or other reasons. Using a unique quasi-experimental setting in Japan that exploits plausibly exogenous regional and temporal variation in the relative availability of those preschools, we find that attendance at an education-oriented preschool is associated with significant improvements in mathematical and linguistic achievement that manifest later in adolescence. Positive effects can also be found for socioemotional measures. Ascending marginal treatment effect (MTE) curves suggests an inverse selection pattern: children that are least likely to enroll in the education-oriented preschool gain the most from it. These children are more likely to come from disadvantaged backgrounds. Heterogeneity in treatment effects is mainly due to specific features of education-oriented preschools (i.e. educational orientation, the interaction with parents due to shorter operating hours, and peer effects), while gains from enrollment in care-oriented preschools appear more homogeneous. 3rd Essay: Unveiling the Unseen Illness: Public Health Warnings and Heat Stroke (with Lester Lusher) The world has been experiencing the hottest summers ever recorded in human history. Research suggests that the health consequences from extreme heat are dire, yet still potentially severely underestimated. We investigate the behavioral and health responses to the first comprehensive heat-health warning system in Japan, where alerts were issued in a region when the forecasted wet bulb globe temperature (WBGT) exceeded 33°C. These alerts inform the public about the risk of heat stroke and encourage people to stay at home, drink a lot, take salt, avoid exercise, use air conditioning, and report to others if they are in poor physical condition. We estimate the impact of these heat alerts using plausibly exogenous region-day variation in the difference between actual and forecasted WBGT (i.e. forecasting errors). By conditioning on local daily WBGT, we separately disentangle the effects of a high heat warning from high heat itself using exogenous variation in forecasting errors. We find that the alerts led to a large and precisely estimated increase in heat stroke counts of around 17%. The effect exists across the spectrum of severity, age groups, and places of incidence. Using data from Google Trends, we find that heat alerts increased general awareness as reflected by increases in searches for the terms “heat stroke,” “heat stroke alert,” and “temperature.” Using additional data from Google Trends, Google Mobility Reports, energy consumption behavior, the population of ambulance records, and our own survey, we rule out any “adverse” response and substitution in health diagnoses away from other sudden illnesses. Therefore, our evidence suggests that the effect is driven by increased reporting of otherwise unidentified cases. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest at least 2,550 additional heat strokes in 2021 and 2022, or 10.2% of all heat strokes recorded on these high-heat days are detected. The effect in low-income compared to high-income neighborhoods is four times the effect in magnitude, highlighting severe environmental inequalities in reporting behavior.