Women’s participation in the labor force has increased substantially over the past half century. In 1930, 10 million women were in the labor force. They represented 24 percent of all working age women and 22 percent of the total work force. By 1955 the number of women workers had doubled, and their labor-force paticipation rate had risen to 36 percent. By 1979 the number had more than quadruple...

This paper studies the impact of income taxes on intensive and extensive labor supply decisions for older workers. The literature provides little evidence about the responsiveness of the older population to tax incentives, though the tax code is a potentially important mechanism for affecting retirement behavior. We estimate the intensive and extensive margins jointly with a new approach accoun...

Children and Women’s Participation Dynamics: Direct and Indirect Effects Children affect the after-birth labor force participation of women in two ways. Directly, the time spent in child-care reduces the labor market effort. Time spent out of the labor market while on maternity leave alters women’s participation experience and indirectly affects subsequent participation behavior. This paper pro...

Push or Pull? Drivers of Female Labor Force Participation during India’s Economic Boom In the past twenty years, India’s economy has grown at increasing rates and now belongs to the fastest-growing economies in the world. This paper examines drivers of female labor force participation in urban India between 1987 and 2004, showing a much more nuanced picture of female labor force participation t...

Goldin argues that the most significant change in labor markets over the past century was the increased participation of women in the labor market. Figure 1 summarizes historical trends in mens' and womens' labor force participation.

Is there a causal connection between house prices and labor force participation of married women? The simple correlation between house prices and married women’s labor force participation across U.S. metro areas is positive. Plausible, informal arguments have been advanced to support causation in either direction: prices raising participation (negative income effects of higher house prices lead...

We examine whether the availability of subsidized health insurance to the non-working population in Taiwan affected the labor force participation of married women. Our empirical identification exploits the fact that such insurance was first made available to wives of government employees, before being made universally available in Taiwan in 1995. We find that the availability of insurance for n...

"The seven-fold increase, since 1920, in the labor force participation rate of married women [in the United States] was not accompanied by a substantial increase in average work experience among employed married women. Two data sets giving life-cycle labor-force histories for cohorts of women born from the 1880s to 1910s indicate considerable (unconditional) heterogeneity in labor-force partic...