TY  - JOUR
AU  - Bailey,Martha J.
AU  - Hershbein,Brad
AU  - Miller,Amalia R.
TI  - The Opt-In Revolution? Contraception and the Gender Gap in Wages
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 17922
PY  - 2012
Y2  - March 2012
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17922
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17922.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Martha J. Bailey
University of Michigan
Department of Economics
611 Tappan Street
207 Lorch Hall
Ann Arbor, MI  48109-1220
Tel: 734/647-6874
Fax: 734/764-2769
E-Mail: baileymj@umich.edu

Brad Hershbein
W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research
E-Mail: hershbein@upjohn.org

Amalia Miller
Department of Economics, University of Virginia
E-Mail: armiller@virginia.edu
AB  - Decades of research on the U.S. gender gap in wages describes its correlates, but little is known about why women changed their career paths in the 1960s and 1970s. This paper explores the role of “the Pill” in altering women’s human capital investments and its ultimate implications for life-cycle wages. Using state-by-birth-cohort variation in legal access, we show that younger access to the Pill conferred an 8-percent hourly wage premium by age fifty. Our estimates imply that the Pill can account for 10 percent of the convergence of the gender gap in the 1980s and 30 percent in the 1990s.
ER  -