University of Maryland LibrariesDigital Repository at the University of Maryland
    • Login
    View Item 
    •   DRUM
    • Theses and Dissertations from UMD
    • UMD Theses and Dissertations
    • View Item
    •   DRUM
    • Theses and Dissertations from UMD
    • UMD Theses and Dissertations
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Women's Labor Supply and the Family

    Thumbnail
    View/Open
    umi-umd-5554.pdf (1.048Mb)
    No. of downloads: 1977

    Date
    2008-06-01
    Author
    Morrill, Melinda Sandler
    Advisor
    Hellerstein, Judith K.
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    Abstract
    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.
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/1903/8503
    Collections
    • Economics Theses and Dissertations
    • UMD Theses and Dissertations

    DRUM is brought to you by the University of Maryland Libraries
    University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742-7011 (301)314-1328.
    Please send us your comments.
    Web Accessibility
     

     

    Browse

    All of DRUMCommunities & CollectionsBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsThis CollectionBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjects

    My Account

    LoginRegister
    Pages
    About DRUMAbout Download Statistics

    DRUM is brought to you by the University of Maryland Libraries
    University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742-7011 (301)314-1328.
    Please send us your comments.
    Web Accessibility