Volume 29, Number 4 (Fall) 1994
Wolf, Douglas A., and Beth J. Soldo. 1994. "Married Women's
Allocation of Time to Employment and Parental
Care." Journal of Human Resources 29(4):1259-1276.
Married women, who have been shown in past research to exhibit relatively elastic labor supply, constitute a group of particular interest with respect to decisions concerning time spent in parental care and time spent in market work. This paper presents estimates of a simultaneous-equations model of employment, hours of work and the provision of care to an older parent. The results provide no evidence of reduced propensities to be employed, or of reduced conditional hours of work, due to the provision of parent care. These findings are consistent with other research on women's allocation of time to competing productive uses.
Douglas A. Wolf is an associate professor of public administration at Syracuse University. Beth J. Soldo is a professor of demography at Georgetown University. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at a conference on "Economic and Demographic Aspects of Intergenerational Relations," held at the RAND Corporation, March 20-22 1992 and at the 1992 annual meeting of the Population Association of America. Useful comments and suggestions have been received from Arleen Leibowitz, Michael Brien, Greg Acs, John Marcotte, Doug Wissoker, Doug Holtz-Eakin, Insan Tunali, and three anonymous reviewers. Vicki Freedman provided valuable help in preparing the data for analysis. This research was supported by grant number AG-08651 from the National Institute on Aging.
The data can be obtained beginning June 1995 through June 1998 from Douglas A. Wolf, Center for Policy Research, Syracuse University, 426 Eggers Hall, Syracuse, NY 13244-1090.
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