This paper examines what author calls a fundamental form of sex discrimination in Pakistan: the fact that women's extensive participation in the labor force is ignored by economic planners. While wage and job discrimination are the most common forms of sex discrimination in Europe and North America, in Pakistan sex discrimination revolves around the divergence between the myth that women do n...

Availability for work and engagement in active job search have been the conventional criteria to distinguish the unemployed from those not in the labor force. In this paper we use American time use survey data 2012-2013 to compare the demographic characteristics, time allocation and life satisfaction between the unemployed and three subgroups of those out of the labor force. The three subgroups...

We study optimal taxation in an environment where the agents di er in their work opportunity costs. The opportunity cost of work is xed, independent of the number of hours worked: the only decision of the agents is to (full time) participate, or not, in the labor force. The planner, who does not observe the opportunity costs, is utilitarian. We nd a large class of planner objectives where it is...

I document differences in labor supply between a set of Latin American countries and the U.S. in the period 1990-2005. In the U.S. the female labor force participation was 69% by 1990, while in Brazil and Mexico was 39% and 37%, respectively. Females began to participate more in the labor market of these countries when more households acquired access to basic infrastructure and when distortive ...

Kristin F. Butcher is an associate professor of economics at Wellesley College and a former senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Kyung H. Park is a senior associate economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. The authors thank Dan Sullivan, Anna Paulson, Bhashkar Mazumder, and seminar participants at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago for helpful comments. The views e...

A key component for estimating the optimal size and structure of disability insurance (DI) programs is the elasticity of DI claiming with respect to benefit generosity. Yet, in many countries, including the United States, all workers face identical benefit schedules, which are a function of one's labor market history, making it difficult to separate the effect of the benefit level from the effe...

In many developing countries, women are prevented to take full advantage of the benefits of living in an urban area. In India, while one of every two men participates in the labor market, it is the case just for one of every six women. In this context, it is thought that access to microfinance is key to bridge the gap and to introduce women into the labor force. This is the first project to rig...