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Title: Essays on Married Women Labor Supply

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2013

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Abstract: One of the very interesting demographic features in the US over the last three decades of the 20th century is the increase of the married women labor force participation rate . Over the same period , estimated labor supply elasticity varies substantially . This dissertation is to investigate the reasons behind them . I first study the determinants of the increase of the labor participation rate for married women with preschool -aged children over the last three decades of the 20th century . Using 5 % samples of the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS ) for 1980 , 1990 and 2000 , I find that the existing explanations proposed in the literature may only account for 9 .6 % increase in the 1980s and 70 % decrease in the 1990s . In this paper , I find that the rising ratio of career type women can explain 30 .33 % of the growth in the labor force participation rate , and the change in the composition of career motivating career type women can at least explain 17 .22 % growth across cohorts . Women who have been working three years before their first childbearing are more likely to return to work after the childbearing period . The analyzing data is the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Women (NLSYW ) from 1968 to 2003 and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79 ) from 1979 to 2008 . This dissertation sheds some insight about a puzzle on estimated married women's labor supply elasticity variation . This important puzzle (sometimes referred to as the Hausman puzzle ) is that the estimated labor supply elasticity varies substantially even when similar frameworks and similar datasets are used . I study the role of budget sets in producing this wide range of estimates . In particular , I study the effect of the typical convexification approximation of the non -convex budgets , and the well -known Heckman critique of the lack of bunching at the kink points of budget sets in the Hausman model . I introduce measurement error in nonlabor income to create an uncertain budget constraint that no longer implies bunching at kink points . Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID ) of 1984 and 2001 , I find that neither the convexification approximation nor using a model with random budget sets affects the estimates . These results demonstrate that variations in budget constraints alone do not explain the different estimates of labor supply elasticity . Changing the level of budget sets , for example by ignoring the state individual income tax , could affect the variation in elasticities .

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Authors: Li, Xinrong

Publisher: Texas A&M University

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Gender, Labor Force and Occupational Structure

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