There are considerable differences in gender unemployment gaps across the EU. We use labor force survey data on 21 countries to perform a series of data decompositions and show that the cross-country variation in gender unemployment gaps is primarily driven by the differences in female labor force participation behavior after childbirth, namely, the family leave duration and the subsequent atta...

This paper uses the National Comorbidity Survey-Replication to estimate effects of recent psychiatric disorder on employment, hours worked, and earnings. We employ methods proposed in Altonji et al. (2005a) which use selection on observable traits to provide information regarding selection along unobservable factors. Among males, disorder is associated with reductions in labor force participati...

This paper examines the decision of Puerto Rican and non-Hispanic women to migrate out of New York and its implications for labor force participation. Between 1975 and 1980 Puerto Rican women in New York were less likely than non-Hispanic and Puerto Rican women in other locations to engage in internal mobility. New York can be characterized as being well endowed with characteristics that inhibi...

Most countries in the developing world have experienced rising female labor force participation over the past twenty years (Heath and Jayachandran, forthcoming). This trend provides the backdrop for my research, which focuses on labor markets in developing countries, with an emphasis on gender. In particular, I study how firms select workers—and how workers select the firms in which they seek w...

Migration of women as domestic workers from developing to developed countries is a growing phenomenon. In Hong Kong, foreign domestic workers (FDWs) account for 6 percent of the labor force and among households with young children, more than one in three hires at least one. This paper investigates the e¤ects of the availability of foreign domestic workers on Hong Kong women’s welfare and decisi...

Cohort-Level Sex Ratio Effects on Women’s Labor Force Participation It follows from a number of theoretical models of marriage that the scarcer women are relative to men, i.e. the higher the sex ratio, the less married women are likely to participate in the labor force. Such sex ratio effects may be stronger among less educated women. These predictions are tested using individual data from Curr...

BACKGROUND What is the factor that affects healthy life expectancy? Healthy life expectancy (HLE) at birth may be influenced by components of the gender inequality index (GII). Notably, this claim is not tested on the between components of the GII, such as population at least secondary education (PLSE) with ages 25 and older, labor force participation rate (LFPR) with ages 15 and older, and the...

Marital status and labor supply decisions could be correlated on the unobservable. Using South Korean data, this paper exploits exogenous selection into marriage caused by an eccentric cultural phenomenon—preferences for wives’ zodiacal signs—to estimate the causal effect of marital status on female labor force participation. D 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.