Marital Instability,Reproductive Behaviour and Women's Labour Force Participation Decisions

ABSTRACT The subject of this paper is the relationship between female labour force participation, fertility decisions and marital instability and pursues a two-fold objective: to explain the nature of the interdependences between participation and procreation decisions; and to look for, through empirical evidence, an explanation for women's labour force participation and fertility dynamics over the last 20 years. The empirical evidence, based on a panel of 19 countries over the period 1965–1989, shows that variables representing marital instability have an important role in woman's labour supply and fertility dynamics during this period.     

The Effect of the Supply of Subsidized Day-care Facilities on Female Labour Supply

ABSTRACT: In this article the hypothesis that a higher level of subsidized day-care facilities leads to an increase in female labour supply is tested for the Netherlands on the basis of two surveys. The results show that (allowing for the women's wage rate, her non-labour income, her age, and the presence of children) labour supply is higher when subsidized day-care supply is higher. However, after including variables that reflect social norms the effect of day-care supply on female labour supply, though still positive and significant, becomes much weaker.     

Disability and Labour Supply during Economic Transition: Evidence from Bulgaria

Abstract. This paper focuses on the interrelationship between disability and labour force participation for the adult population in Bulgaria. We estimate simultaneous equation models with discrete endogenous variables to account for the different forms of interdependence between health and labour supply. Using the Bulgarian Integrated Household Surveys conducted in 1995, 1997 and 2001, our econometric results indicate that disability exerts a negative effect on labour participation, but labour supply has little effect on disability. Evidence from panel data also suggests that disability reduces labour force participation.     

Informal Caregiving and Women's Work Choices: Lessons from the Netherlands

This paper focuses on the effects of Dutch long‐term care and labour market policies on women's labour market participation and informal caregiving decisions. Labour market participation and informal caregiving are estimated jointly through a multivariate dynamic binary probit on European Community Household Panel data. Under Dutch policy, informal care decisions appear to be independent of household non‐labour income and no significant impediment seems to hinder the contemporaneous practice of work activities and care. However, past informal care provision still slightly reduces the probability of currently working and vice versa, leaving room for policy improvements to enhance labour market participation.     

Labor Force Participation of Women in the EU – What Role do Family Policies Play?

We empirically study the role of different family policies in affecting women's labor market behavior in the European Union. Women tend to assume more family duties than men and, consequently, often participate less in the labor market. Family policies aim to support families in general while a particular focus is on helping women to reconcile family duties with labor market participation. Their impact, however, is not clear, especially when it comes to different forms of labor market activity. We use a static and dynamic panel econometric framework examining the link between financial support for four types of family policies and labor force participation as well as (part‐time and full‐time) employment. The results suggest no stable significant impact of expenditures on family policies on overall labor force participation. However, higher spending on family allowance, cash benefits, and daycare benefits appears to promote part‐time employment, whereas only spending on parental leave schemes is a significant positive determinant of women's full‐time employment.     

Women's Career Development and Divorce Risk in Japan

ABSTRACT In Japan, divorce rates have more than doubled since the mid-1960s, and female paid employment has increased rapidly in the past few decades. By applying a conventional economic model of labor force participation to micro-level data gathered from a nationally representative sample survey, this paper shows that Japanese married women who have contemplated divorcing their husbands are more likely to participate in the workforce as full-time paid employees. This finding suggests that an increasing risk of divorce has made a substantial contribution to the fast rise in Japanese women's participation in paid employment, particularly full-time work.     

EXTERNALITIES IN PROGRAM EVALUATION: THE IMPACT OF A WOMEN'S EMPOWERMENT PROGRAM ON IMMUNIZATION

Impact evaluations of development programs usually do not explicitly take into account externalities on non‐participants. Based on a unique dataset we estimate the direct as well as the spillover effects of Mahila Samakhya, a women's empowerment program in India, on child immunization. The survey covers both participants and non‐participants in program villages, as well as respondents in control villages. We account for participation selection bias using instrumental variables. We propose a direct test for the exclusion restriction using the control villages. We find both direct effects on the immunization rates of participants’ children and significant spillovers on immunization rates of non‐participants’ children. The impact of interventions might be substantially underestimated if such external effects were not taken into account. Alternative estimation methods such as propensity score matching and a regression discontinuity approach yield comparable results.     

State Dependence,Serial Correlation and Heterogeneity in Intertemporal Labor Force Participation of Married Women

A dynamic search framework is developed to analyze the intertemporal labor force participation behavior of married women, using longitudinal data to allow for a rich dynamic structure. The sensitivity to alternative distributional assumptions is evaluated using linear probability and probit models. The dynamic probit models are estimated using maximum simulated likelihood (MSL) estimation, to overcome the computational difficulties inherent in maximum likelihood estimation of models with nontrivial error structures. The results find that participation decisions are characterized by significant state dependence, unobserved heterogeneity, and negative serial correlation in the error component. The hypothesis that fertility decisions are exogenous to women's participation decisions is rejected when dynamics are ignored; however, there is no evidence against this hypothesis in dynamic model specifications. Women's participation response is stronger to permanent than current nonlabor income, reflecting unobserved taste factors.     

The Incidence of Household Characteristics on Labour Decisions: The Case of Spain

Abstract. This work presents an approach to the analysis of the incidence of family relationships on individuals' labour decisions as well as on their position in the labour market. We follow two different analyses. Firstly, we attempt to identify the type of households which are the most characteristic in our society to select the main categories of those where most people live, in order to study the decisions about participation in labour markets as well as the incidence of unemployment upon them. The second analysis tries to implement a model to allow us to study the implications of living in a partnership and the probability of both members of a couple having the same labour market status. There are at least two relevant results: the first shows the important concentration of unemployment in households of a couple with adult children and is clearly related to youth and female unemployment and the necessity of political intervention to correct them. The second points out the dependence between the labour status of the couple, mainly when they have a low level of education. Nevertheless, the woman is usually inactive, although this situation tends to change the younger she is, in which case the highest probability is that both members of the couple are employed.     

Women's political leadership participation around the world: An institutional analysis

Understanding institutional systems is critical for the advancement of women's participation in leadership in varying contexts. A unique and global analysis of the contextual factors that affect women in political leadership, this paper extends prior research in the field. This is a cross-country study where we ask, “How are societal-level institutional forces related to women's participation in political leadership?” We collected data from 8 secondary sources on 181 countries and conducted linear regression analyses with six institutional influences: the business environment, societal development, the economic environment, physical and technological infrastructure, political freedom, and culture. Results indicate that to increase the political leadership participation of women, we need to evaluate the following: customs and trade regulations, graft, the gender gap in political empowerment, public spending on education, the economic viability of the country, access to power and the internet, political freedom, and cultural variables like performance orientation, collectivism, and power distance.     

Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity and Gender

We test whether there are gender differences in downward rigidity, using Kahn's histogram‐location method and longitudinal registry data on all formally employed persons from the Estonian Tax and Customs Board. The results show that women resist pay cuts less than men. Also, in circumstances of increasing unemployment women's opposition to pay cuts decreases substantially, whereas men's attitudes towards pay cuts are not significantly affected by labour market conditions.     

Cost of Childcare and Female Employment in the UK

Abstract. Mothers of young children may be prevented from working because of the high cost of available, formal childcare. In the UK, the typical cost of a nursery place is more than the average household spends a year on either food or housing. This study examines the extent to which female labour force participation is affected by the cost of formal childcare. The results suggest that childcare price subsidies have a modest impact both on labour force participation and on the use of formal childcare.     

Labour Participation of Higher Education Students

The aim of this article is to shed light on the determinants of the decision to participate in the labour force while studying, and of the intensity of this participation as measured by the wages earned by students. We show that students react to their future expected economic benefits associated with their chosen course of study. In this sense, our results confirm Lévy‐Garboua’s (Revue française de Sociologie XVII: 53–80, 1976) thesis of working as an adjustment variable for the variations in the expected rate of return of discipline. Our results indicate that the decision to work while studying and its intensity depend on students’ socioeconomic status and material needs, as well as external financial resources. Altogether, our results suggest that the equity and internal efficiency implications of such a social bias in the labour force participation behaviour might not be too important, but that some public interventions might nevertheless improve the overall external efficiency by allowing students to spend more time on more valorizing activities rather than unskilled and low‐paid jobs.     

Flexible Work Arrangements and Intentions of Unemployed Women in Cyprus: A Planned Behaviour Model

Drawing from the theory of planned behaviour, we use 18 focus groups with 113 unemployed women and 150 mail questionnaires to explore whether and how unemployed Cypriot women's subjective norms, attitudes, perceived behavioural control and job versus career aspirations influence their intentions to adopt employee‐ and employer‐driven flexible work arrangements. To analyse the information gathered, we used a combination of content analysis, an external panel of practitioners and academics, principal components analysis, and regressions. Results show that women's positive attitudes towards child‐caring and self‐enhancement and their subjective norms of organizational inflexibility were positively related mainly with intentions to adopt employee‐driven flexible work arrangements. Further, women who found childcare support and employer requirements limiting were more interested in telework; the latter were also more interested in temporary work. Finally, women's career aspirations were related with weekend work and telework, whilst their job aspirations were associated with temporary work. Results raise issues for employers and policy‐makers in Cyprus, and possibly other southern European countries facing similar challenges, in supporting women to become fully integrated in the labour market.     

Regional Labour Market Adjustment: Are Positive and Negative Shocks Different?

This paper analyses regional labour market adjustment in the Finnish provinces during 1971–96. It investigates the interrelations of employment, unemployment and labour force participation to examine how a change in labour demand is adjusted to. The study questions the usual assumption that positive and negative shocks evoke similar adjustment processes. Instead, we test for the possibility that the effects of positive and negative shocks are asymmetric. The analysis reveals that there is little asymmetry in the adjustment to region‐specific labour demand shocks, but adjustment to total (region‐specific plus common component) shocks displays more asymmetry. The region‐specific component of a labour demand shock has short‐lived effects on unemployment and participation, and its effect on employment is very small but permanent [persistent?]. Initially, most of the fall in employment is absorbed by the unemployment and participation rate, but after a few years migration plays a larger role in the adjustment process.     

Schooling and Labor Market Impacts of a Natural Policy Experiment

Abstract. We use a nationally representative household survey to estimate returns to schooling in Venezuela from instrumental variables based on a supply‐side intervention in the education market. These estimates apply to a subgroup of individuals, in the spirit of the local average treatment effect (LATE) literature. Returns to schooling estimates that apply to a subgroup of individuals affected by the policy intervention may be more interesting from a policy perspective than the return to the ‘average’ individual. We use an instrument based on the 1980 education reform (the Organic Law of Education), which provided for 9 years of compulsory basic education. Alternative estimates derived from interacting the education reform with father's education are also obtained. The estimates are consistent with recent findings suggesting that the effect of education, at least for certain subgroups affected by policy intervention, is as large as or larger than what is suggested by ordinary least squares estimates.     

Gender Differences in Lifelong Learning: An Empirical Analysis of the Impact of Marriage and Children

We use recent advances in the statistical analysis of Oaxaca–Blinder decompositions for non‐linear models to analyse the contribution of individual variables to total gender differences in training participation and duration. Results suggest that effects stemming from the intra‐household division of labour contribute significantly to gender differences, but that segregation of the labour market as well as differences in the access to training by tenure, age, occupation, profession and sectors are more important.     

Public Day Care Centres,Company Day Care Centres,and Segregation Between Men and Women in the Labour Market: the Case of the Netherlands*

Abstract. What is needed to diminish segregation between men and women in the labour market is a program of affirmative action for the Netherlands as a whole. Specific measures aimed at the removal of barriers between occupations cannot be successful unless they are imbedded in such an overall program. A necessary part of such a plan are facilities that enable women and men to combine unpaid parental tasks and paid labour. In contrast with public day care centres, company day care centres do not fit into such a plan, because they even enlarge existing segregation. Company day care centres and other measures to facilitate parental care and paid labour are more often found in industries with a larger share of female workers. This relationship is found for both the Netherlands and the United States. It is concluded that it is in the interest of employers as well as women's emancipation to increase the number of public day care centres instead of the number of company day care centres.     

A Stock-Flow Model to Analyse and Forecast Labour Market Variables

ABSTRACT: In confronting problems of employment and unemployment, students of the labour market, and economists in general have focused mainly on the determination of the level of such variables. Much less attention has been paid to such questions as: how many persons have entered the area of employment and the labour force in various time periods, and how many have exited; their sex and age distribution; and the determinants of the level and structure of flows amongst the various labour market conditions. Yet it appears superfluous to underscore the relevance of such questions. To illustrate, suffice it to recall that in Italy, the present level of employment is essentially the same today as it was in 1961‘; but this has not prevented whole generations of young people from 'stably’entering the employment area, albeit with varying degrees of difficulty in different periods. As for the numerous statistical surveys of labour market flows in a range of countries, and as for the works of job search theorists², it should be observed that such surveys and analyses essentially concern conjunctural phenomena. Consequently, these authors have paid no attention to the distinction between short-run turnover and generational turnover, or to the extremely singular characteristics of the statistical data on flows. An attempt to construct labour market models that present an integrated version of the 'structural’aspects of the market in terms of stock and flows is therefore lacking. The present study sets forth various objectives and is divided into two parts. In the first, an analysis of several controversial terminological aspects of the concepts of stock and flow is presented, and an attempt is made to point out those theoretical structures which have been responsible for the long-prevailing neglect of the labour market flows, particularly long-run flows. Then the problem of defining the concepts of short-run and generational turnover will be confronted in light of an analysis of the statistical methods used in the surveys; finally, a methodology for measuring generational flows is proposed. In the second part of the paper a model based on generational flows, as previously defined, will be presented together with a computational procedure capable to produce long run estimates of alternative scenarios of labour demand and supply and of the structure of employment by sex and age. A brief summary of some of the empirical results obtained applying our model and forecasting procedure to the Italian labour market will also be discussed in the final part of the paper.