Full Citation
Title: The Impact of Home Appliances on Employment Decisions of Married Women: New Evidence from Cross-Sectional Data
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2008
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Abstract: One of the leading explanations for the drastic increase in the labor force participation of married women observed in developed countries during the 20th-century, emphasizes theimportance of technological progress in the household sector (e.g., Greenwood, Seshadri, and Yorukoglu (2005)). In this paper, we provide an assessment of this theory in two steps. First, we propose a simple choice-theoretic model of employment decisions of married women and homeappliances adoption. Second, we use micro-level data from the 1960 and 1970 US censuses to analyze the changes over time in home appliances ownership for households where women work versus households where women do not work. Our model shows that not all women who buy home appliances decide to work. Moreover, the fraction of households that own appliances is slightly higher for women who do not work compared to women who work in both census samples. Finally, the magnitude of the increase in home appliances ownership between 1960 and 1970 is similar for women who work and women who do not work. Based upon these findings, we propose an alternative interpretation of the impact of home appliances on the participation decision of married women, where the demand for home appliances depends on family size and household total income but is unrelated to the work decision. We show that our theory is consistent with all relevant facts, the micro ones and the aggregate ones.
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Authors: Buttet, Sebastien
Publisher: Cleveland State University
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Family and Marriage, Other
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