Why are married women working so much?

Larry Jones, Rodolfo Manuelli and Ellen McGrattan

No 317, Staff Report from Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

Abstract: We study the large observed changes in labor supply by married women in the United States over 1950-1990, a period when labor supply by single women has hardly changed at all. We investigate the effects of changes in the gender wage gap, technological improvements in the production of nonmarket goods and potential inferiority of these goods on understanding this change. We find that small decreases in the gender wage gap can explain simultaneously the significant increases in the average hours worked by married women and the relative constancy in the hours worked by single women, and single and married men. We also find that technological improvements in the household have-for realistic values-too small an impact on married female hours and the relative wage of females to males. Some specifications of the inferiority of home goods match the hours patterns, but have counterfactual predictions for wages and expenditure patterns.

Keywords: Women - Employment; Labor supply (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-lab and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (105)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/sr/sr317.pdf Full Text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Why Are Married Women Working so much ? (2015)
Journal Article: WHY ARE MARRIED WOMEN WORKING SO MUCH? (2015)
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:fip:fedmsr:317

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Staff Report from Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kate Hansel ().