Between 2000 and 2050, the share of the population aged 60 and over is projected to increase in every country in the world; the same is true for the 80+ population in all but one country (Mali). Worldwide, the largest absolute increases are yet to come. Although labor force participation rates are projected to decline from 2000 to 2040 in most countries, due mainly to changes in their age distr...

This paper uses CPS data to examine changes in single women’s labor supply elasticities in recent decades. Specifically, the authors investigate trends in how single women’s hours of work and labor force participation rates responded to both wages and income over the years 1979–2003. Results from the base specification suggest that over the observation period, hours wage elasticities decreased ...

Women Social Security Beneficiaries Aged 62 or Older, 196~85* During the past half century, the number of women in the labor force has increased at a substantially higher rate than the number of working age women (table 1). In 1930, 10 million women workers represented only 24 percent of all women and 22 percent of the total labor force. By 1955, the number of women workers had doubled and wome...

The correlation between female labor force participation rate (FPR) and total fertility rate (TFR) across developed countries has switched from negative to positive. This paper provides a structural explanation of the historical pattern via changes in substitutability between mother’s direct childcare and indirect market care. Analysis of a life-cycle model of married women’s labor supply and f...

This paper seeks to address the problems of childcare scarcity, declining fertility rates and work-family conflict faced by the growing female labor force in Japan. Japan’s total fertility rate has been declining since the 1970s and it fell below the replacement level of 1.3 in 2003. Since the 1990s, the Japanese government has implemented pro-natal policies such as childcare market deregulatio...