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In the literature on household work, "gender display" refers to the hypothesis that in order to compensate for their deviation from gender norms women who outearn their husbands tend to do more household work than women whose earnings are similar to those of their husbands. Much of the prior literature on this topic has debated whether or not gender display exists in the United States and other developed countries. However, the extent to which the gender display hypothesis is confirmed may depend on social context. Capitalizing on comparisons of mainland China and Taiwan, this study reexamines the gender display hypothesis in terms of varying social contexts. Our results show that (1) there is some evidence for gender display in rural China and Taiwan, but not in urban China, and (2) the evidence for gender display is more pronounced in Taiwan than in rural China. These results reveal not only that gender display is context-specific, but that the contextual variation of gender display may depend more on gender ideology than on macro-level economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The causal impact of higher education on earnings may be heterogeneous across different members of a population. Using a newly developed instrumental-variable method in economics, we illustrate heterogeneous treatment effects of higher education on earnings resulting from sorting mechanisms that select individuals with certain unobserved attributes into college education. The setting of our empirical work is contemporary Taiwan – a transitional economy that has recently experienced a rapid expansion in higher education. We find distinct patterns by gender, with selection bias most clearly shown among women but not among men: the college return to earnings is on average greater for women who actually attended college than women who did not attend college. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Using recent survey data from the Panel Study of Family Dynamics (PSFD) on 1,655 married persons born in 1964-1976 in southeastern China and Taiwan, we studied coresidence with elderly parents using a multinomial probit model for coresidence type and an ordered probit model for residential distance. The study yielded four findings: (a) Patrilocal coresidence was more prevalent in Taiwan than in China; (b) matrilocal coresidence was more prevalent in China; (c) practical factors mattered in both places; (d) in Taiwan only, a couple's economic resources facilitated breaking away from patrilocal coresidence. The findings suggest that, although economic development does not necessarily result in less traditional familial culture, personal economic resources may enable individual couples to deviate from tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]