All In The Family: Family, Income, And Labor Force Attachment
研究发现，劳动市场研究中忽略家庭和收入变量会导致教育、失业年龄等系数的估计偏差，进而错误推断不同性别群体的劳动力依附差异。
Empirical labor market studies often do not include controls for family and income structure. Because these variables are significantly correlated with many of the variables commonly included, such as education, estimated coefficients are subject to omitted variable bias. We demonstrate how omission of family and income variables can lead to statistically biased coefficient estimates on nonfamily variables and can lead to false inferences by examining labor force attachment of workers who have lost their previous job. The traditional variables most biased by the omission of family and income characteristics are education, displacement age, and predicted pre-displacement wages. As an indication of the extent of the bias, we calculate expected labor force participation rates for single women, married women, and married men using the average characteristics for each group using both the biased and unbiased coefficients. We find a 50 percent reduction in the extent to which market-oriented opportunities explain the differences in observed labor force attachment between married women and men when family characteristics are included relative to when they are not.