Gender Gaps and the Rise of the Service Economy

By L. R. Ngai, Barbara Petrongolo. Social Science Research Network, 2017

325 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper investigates the role of the rise of services in the narrowing of gender gaps in hours and wages in recent decades. We document the between-industry component of the rise in female work for the U.S., and propose a model economy with goods, services and home production, in which women have a comparative advantage in producing market and home services. The rise of services, driven by structural transformation and marketization of home production, acts as a gender-biased demand shift raising women's relative wages and market hours. Quantitatively, the model accounts for an important share of the observed trends.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c2e8b53fd4ba159a76861707146bf24547b13aac

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Citations in the corpus

Economic Gains From Gender Inclusion; New Mechanisms, New Evidence (2018, methodology): “The benchmark values of η and σ are taken from Ngai and Petrongolo (2017) in their US study, and are pinned down by employment responses to past wage gap movements and estimates from the literature addressing the elasticity of substitution between home and market consumption.”
Families in Macroeconomics (2016, unknown): “More recent contributions connect the decline in the gender wage gap explicitly with the rise of the service sector (Rendall, 2010; Ngai and Petrongolo, 2014).”
Taxation and Labor Supply of Married Couples Across Countries: A Macroeconomic Analysis (2018, unknown): “…technological improvements in the household sector (Greenwood and Seshadri, 2002; Greenwood et al., 2005), improvements in maternal health and the introduction of infant formula (Albanesi and Olivetti, 2015), and structural change (Buera et al., 2014; Ngai and Petrongolo, 2014; and Rendall, 2015).”
Skill-Biased Structural Change (2021, background): “3Ngai and Petrongolo (2014) use a similar framework to show that compositional changes in value added associated with development can explain part of the decrease in the gender wage gap that has occured in the US over time.”