• Korea journal of population studies
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.5-40
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• 2002

Using detailed data of women's work history, this study analyses the transition process between employment and non-employment over the life history in order to identity individual and structural determinants in the processes. Korean women comprise very heterogeneous groups in terms of work continuity: one group having a continuous work history and another having an interrupted work experience. While 4.0% of total women have stayed in the labor market since leaving school, 17.3% have not worked outside at all and remaining 87.9% have experienced into and out of the labor market at least once. On the average, the cumulated time of employment per woman is 8.2 years and the cumulated time of unemployment is 13.1 years. Thus Korean women work a total of only 38.5% of their whole lifetime after leaving school. We can conclude that the increase of the employment rate of married women in Korea since the 1970s has been due to the increase of the new entrants with short or little working careers into the labor market, not to the increase of women's work continuity on the whole. A women's educational achievement does not seem to be positively related to employment duration, contrary to the suggestion of the human capital theory, Rather, family variables, especially the existence of the child under 6 yens old, is a more significant determining factor for an individual's exit from employment. And there is little difference among different age cohorts which implies little improvement in the employment continuity of younger women. This study also documents the importance of structural variables, such as the type of occupation, as significant determining factors for the hazard rate. Specially women with professional jobs tend to stay longer in the labor market. Therefore, women's entry into more professional occupations is expected to contribute to the continuity of employment. Our results also show that duration-dependence is not spurious. When unobserved heterogeneity is controlled, the negative relation between the rate from employment and the duration of employment does not disappear.

• 한국사회정책
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.95-123
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• 2016

As Korean society grows rapidly older, a systematic analysis of the determinants of labor supply behavior among the elderly becomes a prerequisite for designing more effective senior employment policies and income security regime for the elderly. Literatures review shows that a majority of previous researches have been ignoring the problem of "endogenous predictor" especially when it comes to the estimation of the effects of the two key variables, education and non-labor income, on labor supply decisions among older people. They have failed to take into consideration the unobserved heterogeneities which might affect both labor supply decisions of the elderly and their levels of education and non-labor income, which means, according to some econometric literatures, that the estimated coefficients of the two predictors can be inconsistent. The paper tries to redress the endogeneity problem by employing a panel logit model with data from the 1st. to 4th. wave of the KLoSA(Korean Longitudinal Survey of Ageing) to estimate the effects of key predictors on the probability of getting jobs among older people(ages of 60 or older). Both a random effects and a fixed effects model reaffirms that non-labor income has a negative effect on the chances of being employed. And a random effects model shows that the effect of education is also negative, as has frequently been reported by previous studies. That means the effects of education and non-labor income on elderly employment remain negative after the effect of unobserved heterogeneities is controled for and the problem of endogenous predictors is redressed through an appropriate panel data analysis. These findings mean, in turn, that when Korean baby-boomers, who had acquired an unprecedentedly higher level of education and were expected to enjoy ever-larger amount of non-labor income than their preceding generations, retires in near future, their incentives to work will become much weaker and the lack of labor-force and the burden of financing increased public pension expenditure will become more troublesome. The paper concludes with recommending some policy initiatives helpful to solve these expected problems.

• Journal of Labour Economics
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.97-129
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• 2002

It is well known that the quality of job match has strong influence on the efficient allocation of labor resources in the economy on the macro level and also on the productivity of individual worker. Regarding this point we assumed that the selection of preferred job at the job entry can be interpreted as a subjective indicator of job match quality and tried to estimate the effects of such selection on the wage level. For this purpose we suggested random effects switching regression model and applied this model to the data of the Korea Labor Institute Panel Study from 1998 to 2000. As the results of estimation, we found that there exists large wage differentials at least more than fifty percent caused by such selection. Considering the fact that such wage differentials can not be suitably explained by the traditional reasons of the wage discrimination, we suggest the possibility that there also exists large productivity gap caused by the job mismatch and the necessity of improving the job placement service activity.