Women Labor Market Participation in Europe: Novel Evidence on Trends and Shaping Factors

Angela Cipollone (), Eleonora Patacchini and Giovanna Vallanti

No 7710, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We investigate the changes in women's participation patterns across 15 EU countries over the last 20 years using individual data from ECHP and EUSILC databases. Our findings reveal a role of social policies and institutional factors that is stronger than what has so far been assessed. Labor market reforms explain almost 25% of the actual increase in labor force participation for young women, and more than 30% for highly educated women. The effects of labor market reforms on the participation of low skilled women in the labor force are instead surprisingly small. We also find that reforms of the institutional framework towards a model of flexicure labor market are effective in enhancing women labor supply only when deregulation is accompanied by sufficient social compensation.

Keywords: child-rearing; labor market institutions; employment gender gap; elderly care; flexicurity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J11 J2 J21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 52 pages
Date: 2013-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-lab and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Published - published as 'Female labour market participation in Europe: novel evidence on trends and shaping factors' in: IZA Journal of European Labor Studies, 2014, 3, 18 (2014)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp7710.pdf (application/pdf)

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:iza:izadps:dp7710

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().