What Explains the Stagnation of Female Labor Force Participation in Urban India? We study the surprisingly low level and stagnation of female labor force participation rates in urban India between 1987 and 2009. Despite rising growth, fertility decline, and rising wages and education levels, women’s labor force participation stagnated at around 18%. Using five large cross-sectional micro survey...

Female Labor Market Transitions in Europe Using micro panel data, labor market transitions are analyzed for the EU-member states by cumulative year-by-year transition probabilities. As female (non-)employment patterns changed more dramatically than male employment in past decades, the analyses mainly refer to female labor supply. In search for important determinants of these transitions, six EU...

I compare two birth-cohorts of married women and find that divorce-risk plays a significantly smaller role in the recent cohort’s labor supply decision. This suggests that any decline in America’s divorce rates will not substantially reduce married women’s labor supply.  2000 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved.

Commonly used frictional models of the labor market imply that changes in frictions have large effects on steady state employment and unemployment. We use a model that features both frictions and an operative labor supply margin to examine the robustness of this feature to the inclusion of a empirically reasonable labor supply channel. The response of unemployment to changes in frictions is sim...

This paper investigates whether one’s effort to keep up with the Joneses has any effect on labor supply behavior. We provide a simple model and empirical evidence that labor supply decisions of married women are influenced by relative as well as absolute income of their husbands. We find, after controlling for husbands’ absolute income and other individual characteristics, that married women ar...

We study the constrained Pareto efficient allocations in a dynamic production economy in which the group in political power decides the allocation of resources. We show that Pareto efficient allocations take a quasi-Markovian structure and can be represented recursively as a function of the identity of the group in power and updated Pareto weights. For high discount factors, the economy ultimat...

In this article, I argue that tax and transfer policies are more efficient than immigration restrictions as instruments for raising the after-tax incomes of the least skilled native workers. Policies to protect these native workers from immigrant competition in the labor market are no better at promoting distributive justice and are likely to impose a greater economic burden on natives in the c...

the nonlinear budget set in the labor supply application, Figure A1 depicts a nonlinear budget set induced by a simple progressive tax. The after-tax wage, w, that a worker faces varies with the tax rate, t.2 The labor supply application examines the effect of the after-tax wage (the slope) on hours (the horizontal axis) controlling for income (the vertical axis). Similarly, I examine the effec...

Using longitudinal survey data collected in Kenya, this paper estimates the longer-term impacts of antiretroviral therapy (ART) on the labor supply of treated adults and their household members. Building upon previous work in Kenya, data collected from 2004-2006 indicate that early evidence on the short-run impacts of ART tends to be upheld over the long-term as well. The results show that the ...

would also like to thank the members of the graduate labor office at UC Berkeley, all of whom have provided helpful suggestions on this work. This research was carried out with the support of a Dissertation Fellowship from the California Census Data Research Center. ** The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philad...