Volume 21, Number 2 (Spring) 1986

O'Brien, A. Maureen, and Clifford B. Hawley. 1986. "The Labor Force Participation Behavior of Married Women Under Conditions of Constraints on Borrowing." Journal of Human Resources 21(2):267-278.

This paper investigates the effect of a borrowing constraint on the labor force participation of married women. The model developed here relaxes the assumption of perfect markets found in standard life-cycle models. We find evidence that married women's work in the market is positively related to the existence and extent of family borrowing restrictions. We suggest that the failure to account for this constant in family borrowing may be the reason for the unexpected positive sign in most empirical studies of the effect of family assets on a wife's work.