PURPOSE OF THE STUDY Aging successfully entails good physical and cognitive health, as well as ongoing participation in social and productive activity. This study hones in on participation in productive activity, a factor that makes an important contribution to successful aging. One conceptual model of productive activity in later life specifies the antecedents and consequences of productivity....

The education gap between men and women has closed, or has even reversed in many countries. Have countries also made progress in closing other gaps facing women? Using micro-level Census data for close to 40 countries, we examine several dimensions of gender disparity: we compare men and women’s labor force participation (the labor force participation gap), married and single women’s labor forc...

Unlike in the United States where fertility is found to be negatively correlated with female labor force participation, China has witnessed a decrease in both fertility and female labor force participation since the 1980s. Does fertility play a different role in female labor force participation in China than in the U.S.? To answer this question, this paper exploits plausibly exogenous variation...

The participation of women in the labor force has increased substantially during the past half century. In 1930, the 10 million women workers represented only 24 percent of all women and 22 percent of the total labor force (table 1). By 1957, the number of women workers had doubled and their labor-force participation had increased to 37 percent. In 1983, 48 million women were in the labor force...

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate whether an increase in the level of human capital and reduction of gender inequality in the labor market affect developing nation’s growth rate and welfare. The data used in this thesis cover 74 emerging and developing countries for the years of 2001 and 2007. Solow’s augmented growth model has been used to estimate how increased rates of females and...

BACKGROUND Maternal labor force participation has increased dramatically over the last 40 years, yet surprisingly little is known about longitudinal patterns of maternal labor force participation in the years after a birth, or how these patterns vary by education. OBJECTIVE We document variation by maternal education in mothers' labor force participation (timing, intensity, non-standard work,...

The analysis in this paper finds that the dramatic decline in labor force participation during the Great Recession is more than explained by deteriorating labor market conditions (cyclical factors).Behavior adjusted over this time period to boost labor force participation so that it was higher in 2012 than would have been predicted by the model. Depending on the strength of the labor market goi...