Women's Labor Supply and the Family

View/ Open
Date
2008-06-01Author
Morrill, Melinda Sandler
Advisor
Hellerstein, Judith K.
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
The past century has seen a tremendous rise in female labor force participation.
My dissertation addresses aspects of how the American family has shaped and
has been shaped by rising levels of female labor supply. The first chapter provides an
introduction and discussion. The second chapter describes the impact of maternal
employment on children's health. While most prior research has found little effect, I
argue that a woman's choice to work may reflect unobservable characteristics of the
mother or child which complicates the measurement of the causal effect. I utilize
exogenous variation in each child's youngest sibling's eligibility for kindergarten as
an instrument for maternal employment. I find robust evidence that maternal employment
increases a child's probability of having had an overnight hospitalization,
injury or poisoning, or asthma episode.
The third and fourth chapters analyze two possible sources of increased female
labor force participation. In the third chapter, co-authored with Judith Hellerstein,
we consider the role that fathers play in their daughters' occupational choices.
We demonstrate that over the past century fathers have increasingly transmitted
occupation-specific human capital to their daughters in response to the changing
opportunities for women in the labor market.
In the fourth chapter, I investigate work first published by Fernandez et al.
(2004) and find evidence that contradicts their central conclusions. Their paper
suggests a mechanism by which working mothers endow sons with a preference for
having a working wife, which in turn leads women to choose to work more in order to
attract these men. The key empirical results in their paper show a strong conditional
correlation between a woman's labor supply and that of her mother-in-law when her
husband was young and no similar relationship between a woman's labor supply
and that of her own mother. While I confirm the former relationship in my own
analysis, I find that a woman's choice to work is also highly correlated with her own
mother's labor supply. While their model provides an interesting hypothesis for
women's motivation to work, I find that the data do not support their conclusions.