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

Jesus Carro, Matilde Machado () and Ricardo Mora Villarrubia

UC3M Working papers. Economics from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Economía

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: 2014-10-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-gro, nep-lab and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Working Paper: Transmission of preferences and beliefs about female labor market participation: direct evidence on the role of mothers (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cte:werepe:we1421

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