Dynamic Female Labor Supply

By Zwi Eckstein, Osnat Lifshitz. Social Science Research Network, 2009

177 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The increase in female employment and participation rates is one of the most dramatic economic changes to have taken place during the last century. However, while the employment rate of married women more than doubled during the last fifty years, that of unmarried women remained almost constant. In order to empirically analyze these trends we divide the paper into two parts: In the first, we empirically estimate a traditional female dynamic labor supply model using an extended version of Eckstein and Wolpin (1989) in order to compare the various explanations in the literature for the observed trends. The main finding is that the rise in education levels accounts for about one-third of the increase in female employment while about 40 percent remains unexplained by observed household characteristics. We show that this unexplained portion can be empirically attributed to changes in preferences or the costs of childrearing and household maintenance. In the second part, we formulate and estimate a new framework for the couple intra-family game that is then used to analyze the household dynamic labor supply. We find that female labor supply may have increased significantly due to a change in the form of the household game.

Subfields: Demography, Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/876f02fcf1edf58d904a6f099a49c35588d79fea

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Citations in the corpus

Cultural Change as Learning: The Evolution of Female Labor Force Participation over a Century (2011, background): “…often by default, that this last category of difficult-to-measure variables plays an important quantitative role in accounting for the large changes seen in married women’s LFP (see, e.g., Eckstein and Lifshitz (2009), Lee and Wolpin (2010), and Heathcote, Storesletten, and Violante (2010)).”
Human Capital Investments and Expectations about Career and Family (2016, unknown): “Changes in labor supply behavior by marital state have been well documented (Killingsworth and Heckman 1986; Eckstein and Lifshitz 2011).”
Would People Behave Differently If They Better Understood Social Security? Evidence From a Field Experiment (2011, background): “Eckstein and Lifshitz (2011) show that female labor force participation rates rose by more than 10 percentage points at most ages between the 1935 and 1945 birth cohorts.”
Fair Play::More Equal Laws Boost Female Labor Force Participation (2015, background): “Eckstein and Lifshitz (2011) estimate a dynamic stochastic female labor supply model with discrete choice (contained in Eckstein and Wolpin 1989) and find that changes in education (accounting for a third of the increase in female employment) and wages (explaining about 20 percent) play a large…”
Divorce Risk, Wages and Working Wives: A Quantitative Life‐Cycle Analysis of Female Labour Force Participation (2014, unknown): “Most closely related to our work is the recent paper by Eckstein and Lifshitz (2011).”