Transmission of preferences and beliefs about female labor market participation: direct evidence on the role of mothers

Matilde Machado (), Jesus Carro and Ricardo Mora Villarrubia

No 10218, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: Recently, economists have established that culture defined as a common set of preferences and beliefs?affects economic outcomes, including the levels of female labor force participation. Although this literature has argued that culture is transmitted from parents to children, it has also recognized the difficulty in empirically disentangling the parental transmission of preferences and/or beliefs from other confounding factors, such as technological change or investment in education. Using church registry data from the 18th and 19th centuries, our primary contribution is to interpret the effect of a mother?s labor participation status on that of her daughter as the mother-to-daughter transmission of preferences and/or beliefs that are isolated from confounding effects. Because our data are characterized by abundant non-ignorable missing information, we estimate the participation model and the missing process jointly by maximum likelihood. Our results reveal that the mother?s working status has a large and statistically significant positive effect on the daughter?s probability of working. These findings suggest that intergenerational family transmission of preferences and/or beliefs played a decisive role in the substantial increases in female labor force participation that occurred later.

Keywords: Female labor market participation; Intergenerational transmission of preferences and/or beliefs; Historical family data; Church registry data; Non-ignorable missingness; Econometric methods for missing data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J12 J16 J22 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP10218 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:10218

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP10218

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().