Implications of Changes in Men's and Women's Labor Force Participation for Real Compensation Growth and Inflation

2005 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharine Anderson ◽  
Lisa Barrow ◽  
Kristin F. Butcher

AbstractDuring the 1990s economic expansion, the United States enjoyed both low inflation and low unemployment. Juhn, Murphy, and Topel (2002) point out that low unemployment for men in the 1990s was accompanied by historically high non-employment suggesting that the 1990s economy was not as strong as unemployment might indicate. We include women in the analysis and examine whether Phillips curve relationships between real compensation growth, changes in inflation, and labor market slackness are the same for men and women and whether measures of “non-employment” better capture underlying labor resource utilization. From 1965 to 2002 the increase in women’s labor force participation more than offsets the decline for men, and low unemployment rates in the 1990s were accompanied by historically low overall non-employment rates. We find that women’s measures of labor market slackness do as well as men’s in explaining real compensation growth and changes in inflation after 1983.

2014 ◽  
Vol 104 (5) ◽  
pp. 342-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raquel Fernández ◽  
Joyce Wong

Married women's labor force participation (LFP) increased dramatically in the United States between the 1940 and 1960 cohort. The two cohorts lived under different divorce regimes (unilateral divorce rather than mutual consent). The 1960 cohort also had a lower gender wage gap. We use a quantitative dynamic life-cycle model of endogenous marital status, calibrated to key statistics for the 1940 cohort, to study the effects of these two changes. We find that both drivers combined are able to account for over 50 percent of the increase in married women's LFP and also generate large movements in marriage and divorce rates.


ILR Review ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 483-504 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert F. Schoeni

Using 1970, 1980, and 1990 U.S. census data, the author examines the life-cycle patterns of immigrant women's labor force participation. He finds that the cross-sectional approach that has been used in all previous studies leads to a substantial over-estimate of the degree to which immigrant women's assimilation increases their labor force participation. The effect of assimilation found by using the cohort approach, however (which acknowledges the possibility that patterns of labor force participation partly reflect the year of immigration), is still sizable. The effect is concentrated within the first 10 years after arrival. There are substantial differences in participation and assimilation by country of birth. Immigrants from Japan, Korea, and China are found to have experienced the greatest degree of assimilation, with an effect that raises the probability of working by 20 percentage points during the first 10 years after arriving in the United States.


2013 ◽  
Vol 103 (1) ◽  
pp. 472-500 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raquel Fernández

This paper develops a learning model of cultural change to investigate why women's labor force participation (LFP) and attitudes toward women's work both changed dramatically. In the model, women's beliefs about the long-run payoff from working evolve endogenously via an intergenerational learning process. This process generically generates the data's S-shaped LFP curve and introduces a novel role for wage changes via their effect on the speed of intergenerational learning. The calibrated model does a good job of replicating the evolution of female LFP in the United States over the last 120 years and finds that the new role for wages was quantitatively significant.


2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 562-587
Author(s):  
Sabino Kornrich ◽  
Leah Ruppanner ◽  
Trude Lappegård

Abstract Scholars have recently documented inequalities in parents’ spending on children in the United States. This article situates these trends cross-nationally by using expenditure data from the United States, Australia, Spain, and Norway. The article investigates differences across countries in the links between household income, female labor force participation, and spending on children. The links between income, female labor force participation, and spending are largest in the United States and smallest in Norway, while Spain and Australia are intermediate cases, suggesting that public provision lessens inequalities in parental spending on children.


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