Understanding why black women are not working longer

Joanna Lahey

No 22680, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Black women in current cohorts ages 50 to 72 years have lower employment than similar white women, despite having had higher employment when they were middle-aged and younger. Earlier cohorts of older black women also worked more than their white counterparts. Although it is not surprising that white women’s employment should catch up to that of black women given trends in increasing female labor force participation, it is surprising that it should surpass that of black women. This chapter discusses factors that contribute to this differential change over time. Changes in education, marital status, home-ownership, welfare, wealth, and cognition cannot explain this trend, whereas changes in occupation, industry, health, and gross motor functioning may explain some of the trend.

JEL-codes: J14 J15 J2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-lab
Note: AG DAE LS PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published as Understanding Why Black Women Are Not Working Longer , Joanna N. Lahey. in Women Working Longer: Increased Employment at Older Ages , Goldin and Katz. 2018

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22680.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: Understanding Why Black Women Are Not Working Longer (2017)
Working Paper: Understanding why Black Women are not Working Longer (2016)
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:nbr:nberwo:22680

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w22680

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().