We investigate the effect of immigration on the labor supply of skilled women, using data on Spain’s large recent immigration wave. We adopt a spatial correlations approach and instrument for current immigration using ethnic networks. We find that female immigration increases the local availability of household services and reduces their price. It also increases the labor supply of skilled nati...

Steady-State Labor Supply Elasticities: A Survey Previous reviews of static labor supply estimations concentrate mainly on the evidence from the 1980s and 1990s, Anglo-Saxon countries and early generations of labor supply modeling. This paper provides a fresh characterization of steady-state labor supply elasticities for Western Europe and the US. We also investigate the relative contribution o...

This paper discusses some recent advances in the area of culture and economics and examines the effect of culture on a key economic outcome: female labor supply. To separate the effect of market variables and institutions from culture, I use an epidemiological approach, studying second-generation American women. I use both female labor force participation (LFP) and attitudes in the women’s coun...

We find differential rates of cohabitation with adult relatives as well as differential impacts of that cohabitation on the probability of employment for married female immigrants across regions of origin. This suggests that traditions and/or cultural determinants of family structure influence female labor force participation. Not surprisingly, we also find that the labor supply response is big...

Rubble Women: The Long-Term Effects of Postwar Reconstruction on Female Labor Market Outcomes During World War II, more than one-half million tons of bombs were dropped in aerial raids on German cities, destroying about forty percent of the total housing stock nationwide. With a large fraction of the male population gone, the reconstruction process had mainly fallen on women in postwar Germany....

Health reforms in low and middle-income countries usually include the provision of free or subsidized health insurance. In this paper, I examine whether this type of insurance encourages employment by freeing up resources previously used by households to cope with health shocks. To isolate the causal effect of providing free health insurance I use a differencein-differences design that exploits...