Job Flexibility and Occupational Selection in Ghana: An Application of Maximum Simulated Likelihood

Jonathan Lain

Journal of African Economies, 2019, vol. 28, issue 5, 479-510

Abstract: In many African labour markets, the vast majority of self-employed workers are female. It is often hypothesised that self-employment enables workers to balance income-generation with caring for children and other domestic tasks and, since responsibility for these activities is divided unequally in the household, this effect is stronger for women than men. However, testing whether ‘job flexibility’ matters is difficult because variables that proxy for domestic obligations—such as the number of dependents in the household—may be endogenous to occupational choice. In this paper, we build a new estimator using maximum simulated likelihood that allows us to use selection on observables as a guide to selection on unobservables within the multinomial choice problem individuals face when deciding their occupation. We apply this approach to detailed cross-sectional data from Ghana. Our results show that having extra dependents in the household pushes women towards own account self-employment substantially more than men, even under more conservative assumptions about the extent of endogeneity.

Keywords: maximum simulated likelihood; unobservable selection; occupational choice; self-employment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jae/ejz006 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:jafrec:v:28:y:2019:i:5:p:479-510.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of African Economies is currently edited by Francis Teal

More articles in Journal of African Economies from Centre for the Study of African Economies Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().