This paper explores how safety concerns and cultural norms associated with female purity have an impact on labor supply in urban India. I find that a 1 standard deviation increase lagged media reports per 1,000 people of local sexual assaults reduces the probability woman is employed outside her home by 0.67 percentage points (or 5.5% sample average). this short-lived effect significant despite...

Intermarriage between a native and immigrant can affect the household’s supply of labor hours. Spouse selectivity on the basis of human capital, distribution of bargaining power, and labor supply coordination within the household can differ by type of marriage and gender of the immigrant—and, consequently, affect how spouses supply labor to the market. Using the 2010 American Community Survey, ...

We use a specially designed survey to evaluate the effect of several public policies on female labor force participation in Chile. First, we estimate a self-selection model to find the determinants of female labor participation and wages. Our participation estimates show that schooling is highly positively correlated with participation and being married or having a partner is negatively correla...

In many European countries, increasing female labor supply is an explicit policy goal, e.g. to alleviate financial pressure on public social security systems caused by demographic change. At the same time, the stagnating female labor force participation has become a point of discussion in the US (Blau and Kahn, 2013). A large range of policies explicitly aim at establishing equal labor market o...

I document differences in labor supply between a set of Latin American countries and the U.S. in the period 1990-2005. These differences are mostly explained by large differences in female labor supply. In the U.S. the female labor force participation was 69% by 1990, while in Brazil and Mexico was 39% and 37%, respectively. Females began to participate more in the labor market of these countri...

A look at the spatial variation in male and female agricultural wages in India throws up a seeming paradox: gender differentials are the largest in the southern regions of India that are otherwise favourable to women. Boserup (1970) hypothesized that this is due to the greater labor force participation of women in these regions. This is not obvious as greater female labor supply could depress m...

The correlation between female labor force participation rate (FPR) and total fertility rate (TFR) across developed countries has switched from negative to positive. This paper provides a structural explanation of the historical pattern via changes in substitutability between mother’s direct childcare and indirect market care. Analysis of a life-cycle model of married women’s labor supply and f...

In the year 2000, the German government passed the most ambitious tax reform in post-war German history aiming at a significant tax relief for households. One central aim of this tax reform was to improve work incentives and, thereby, foster employment. In this paper, I estimate an intertemporal discrete choice model of female labor supply that allows to analyze the behavioral effects of the ta...