Capital and Female Employment in Manufacturing

Rakesh Banerjee, Tushar Bharati and Swami Jishnurupananda
Additional contact information
Rakesh Banerjee: University of Exeter Business School
Tushar Bharati: Department of Economics, University of Western Australia, http://www.web.uwa.edu.au/person/tushar.bharati
Swami Jishnurupananda: Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, Howrah, India

No 26-05, Economics Discussion / Working Papers from The University of Western Australia, Department of Economics

Abstract: We study the relationship between capital intensification and female employment outcomes. Using panel data on more than 25,000 manufacturing firms across over $100$ countries, we document a robust empirical regularity: as firms become more capital intensive, they employ fewer female workers and more male workers. We further substantiate this relationship using a natural experiment that exogenously altered establishments' access to capital. Exploiting changes to Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) regulations in India during the 2000's and combining them with more than 15 years of data from the Annual Survey of Industries, we find that the liberalization of FDI rules led to substantial increases in capital intensity and male employment but declines in female employment and the female wage bill.

Keywords: foreign direct investment; capital intensifcation; U-shaped female labor force participation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J3 J4 O1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43
Date: 2026
Note: MD5 = 6b4aa1b62fb75058bcad567d5cd06dff
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ecompapers.biz.uwa.edu.au/paper/PDF%20of%2 ... 0Jishnurupananda.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:uwa:wpaper:26-05

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Discussion / Working Papers from The University of Western Australia, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sam Tang ().