Knowledge that Transforms

The rate of participation in the labor force by married women is lower in the Netherlands than in similar industrialized countries. However, since the end of the Second World War the participation rate increased from almost zero to almost one-fourth in less than 35 years. Using estimation results obtained with a probit model on a 1979 nationwide cross-section, this paper tries to reconstruct the postwar growth in this participation rate. It is found in particular that the increase in the real wage for female workers contributes substantially to the explanation of the observed long-run change. Given the relatively high own-wage elasticity, one would also expect Dutch wives to catch up in the future with the level of participation observed in neighboring countries.

The labor force participation of Jewish women in Israel increased between 1955 and 1980, accelerating in the 1970s. Schooling accounts for most of the change. The sharpest rise is among mothers ages 25-44. Thus differentials in participation by marital status have been sharply narrowed and the life cycle in participation has been transformed, the M-shaped curve being replaced by an inverted U with delayed labor force entry due to prolonged schooling and more continuous participation throughout the childbearing period. The reduced incompatibility between child rearing and market work is associated with part-time work and increased reliance on day-care services. The increased employment of women is concentrated in the service industries, mostly public, and is accompanied by some decline in the relative wage of highly educated women. Successive cross-section estimates corroborate this picture in general but do not support the notion that over time preschool children interfere less in women's labor supply.

This paper presents a wage-bargaining model in which the employer and employee are each uncertain about the other's reservation wage. Under specified circumstances, the model's equilibrium is shown to involve unilateral wage setting and inefficient labor turnover. In addition, aggregate demand shocks affect the equilibrium in a way that produces procyclical quits and countercyclical layoffs. These results are obtained without resorting to assumptions of nominal wage rigidity, long-term contracting, or aggregate price misperceptions.

We consider the relation between wages and productivity by means of a model based on the following assumptions. Workers live for 2 periods, firms live forever, senior workers differ nontrivially from junior, seniority enhances workers' expected second-period earnings, both firms and workers recognize the prospect of promotion and the senior-junior wage differential at the time of hiring, and firms have monopsony power in hiring junior workers. We show that senior wages are equal to the senior marginal product, but junior wages are set below the junior marginal product by an amount that depends on the elasticity of the firm's labor supply.

The rationale for government policies aimed at promoting market work by women is examined according to the criteria of efficiency and equity. Efficiency involves the issues of market failure and labor market discrimination. Equity involves the economic well-being of women compared to that of men. The case for interventionist policies on behalf of women is found to be weak on efficiency grounds but strong on equity grounds. It is suggested that conventional measures of labor market discrimination against women are hopelessly ambiguous, and an alternative measure of economic discrimination is proposed. Lifetime measures of income for men and women are constructed to measure this concept of discrimination, and it is shown that women are poorer than men throughout most of their adult lives.

Matching models usually assume an exogenously given distribution of match productivity, and the act of changing jobs then has the worker taking a new, independent sample from this distribution. Using a "characteristics" approach to matching two heterogeneous populations, this article shows that assumptions concerning the normality and serial independence of match productivity (across successive matches) follow from some simple axioms. Moreover, the normality assumption receives support from an empirical test that uses data on the output of a large group of workers.

Over the last two generations, women in Soviet Russia reached the highest labor force participation rate in the world. As everywhere else, the process was accompanied by a sharp rise in their educational attainment and a similarly sharp decline in fertility. On the basis of data about families of Soviet emigrants during the early 1970s, it is shown that Soviet women respond to the same economic variables that create similar trends in market economies. Socialist ideology and Soviet growth strategy help on the one hand to expedite the process, but on the other amplify the contradiction between women's family and labor market roles and result in relatively low wages for women.

Affirmative action may be broadly conceived of as pursuing either the goal of reducing discrimination or that of redistributing jobs and earnings. I attempt to infer the ends of affirmative action policy by analyzing the historical record of enforcement. Optimal enforcement strategies are developed for both the antidiscrimination and the earnings redistribution models and then compared with new data on the actual targeting of affirmative action compliance reviews during the late 1970s. I find that establishments with very low proportions of minority or female workers are not significantly more likely to be reviewed, but that white-collar-intensive establishments are more likely to be reviewed. This indicates the shortcomings of the antidiscrimination model in explaining the OFCCP's behavior and suggests the potential usefulness of the earnings redistribution model.

This paper summarizes some facts on female work in Germany and presents some recent econometric explorations. The econometric method adopted is the TOBIT procedure, which allows one to estimate labor supply functions including both hours worked and participation. The general finding is that it is necessary to distinguish among several groups of females: while work participation of young single women decreased substantially, married women have a higher participation rate today than in earlier years. In addition, income elasticities of labor supply and their decomposition are estimated but several caveats regarding these estimates are in order.

This paper examines labor force participation of women in France and its evolution over time. Cross-section estimates of a logit model measure the effects on participation of wives' wages, husbands' earnings, families' unearned income, and number of children. They are found to be in accordance with theory. Applied to historical data, these estimates overpredict actual changes. A new specification of the participation model, using as endogenous variable the fraction of lifetime after leaving school spent in the labor force, shows that the effect of the main explanatory variable, education, changed over time. This model gives accurate predictions.