BACKGROUND The labor force participation rate is an important indicator of the state of the labor market and a major input into the economy's potential for creating goods and services. The objectives of this paper are to examine the prevalence of labor force participation among older people in Thailand and to investigate the factors affecting this participation. METHODS The data for this stud...

We study the relationship between divorce rates and female labor force attachment in the US. Recent cross-sectional evidence from US states displays a robust negative correlation between divorce and the rate of married female labor force participation. We suggest that this pattern can be explained at least partly by increased bargaining flexibility within two-earner as against one-earner househ...

Home production has dramatically changed during the course of the 20th century and labor saving technologies, from running water to modern appliances, have reduced the time demands of home production. This paper uses 1940 and 1950 US Census data to assess the impact of the increased diffusion of plumbing facilities and modern refrigeration (which presence nearly doubled during the decade) on fe...

This paper finds a strong positive correlation between female labor force participation and negative health outcomes for middle-aged men and women, and suggests that this correlation is mediated by household-level stress. At the crosscountry aggregate level, I show that labor force participation of women is associated with increased mortality rates among both men and women. At the individual le...

In this paper, I analyze how the rise to power of the Muslim Brotherhood, marked by increased parliamentary power in late 2006 due to unprecedented success in the 2005 elections, impacts female labor force participation in districts in which Muslim Brotherhood candidates won compared to those in which they did not win. I use a difference in differences estimation strategy, using both district a...

Antiretroviral (ARV) drug treatment for AIDS dramatically improves health status and increases life expectancy, but there is little evidence on whether it improves employment outcomes in developing countries. In this paper, I examine the labor market effects of the government provision of free ARV treatment in public health clinics in South Africa, which enrolled over 500,000 patients between 2...

Migration of women as domestic workers from developing to developed countries is a growing phenomenon. In Hong Kong, foreign domestic workers (FDWs) account for 6 percent of the labor force and among households with young children, more than one in three hires at least one. This paper investigates the e¤ects of the availability of foreign domestic workers on Hong Kong women’s welfare and decisi...