Volume 29, Number 2 (Spring) 1994
Duleep, Harriet Orcutt, and Seth Sanders. 1994. "Empirical
Regularities Across Cultures: The Effect of Children on
Woman's Work." Journal of Human Resources 29(2):328-348.
Not conditioning on previous employment, we find large differences in the apparent effects of children on married women's labor supply among American-born white women and three ethnically distinct groups on newly arrived immigrants to the United States. When we account for labor supply in the previous year, differences in current employment rates narrow dramatically and similar child status-work relations emerge. Both for women who worked and for those who did not work in the previous year, number of children is not associated with the propensity to start or to continue working and, with the exception of a "baby effect" for women who worked previously, the age of the youngest child has little effect on the propensity to start or to continue working. Information about work experience prior to the previous year yields additional valuable information for predicting current labor supply.
Harriet Orcutt Duleep is a senior research associate of the Urban Institute and a visiting scholar at the Division of economic Research, Social Security Administration. Seth Sanders is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Heinz School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie-Mellon University. This paper has benefitted from useful comments from James R. Walker and Alice Nakamura, as well as from Arnold Katz, Steve Sandell, participants of the Donner Foundation February 1991 Workshop and December 1991 Conference on the Economic Well-Being of Women and Children, held at the University of Minnesota Industrial Relations Center, and participants of the 1992 Society of Government Economists/ASSA session "Labor Force Participation and Earnings of Women in the 1980s." The data for this article can be obtained beginning in August 1994 through August 1997 from Seth Sanders, Heinz School of Public Policy, 4600 Forbes Ave., Carnegie-Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA 15213.
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