occupational self selection a human capital approach to sex differences in occupational structure a rich and diverse literature exists concerning the distribution of labor incomes one approach namely that of human capital concentrates on lifetime accumulation paths of earnings capacity units human capital individual variations in human capital imply differences in earnings power thereby yielding strong implications concerning earnings distribution within a population despite its explanatory power the human capital model has been widely criticized one criticism centers on its inability to obtain inferences concerning occupational distribution the purpose of this paper is to alleviate at least some such criticism by applying the hedonic price approach so as to embed occupational choice into the human capital framework the significance is that neoclassical economic theory can be used to obtain implications concerning the determinants of occupational structure excerpt

women s work and economic development using a cross country dataset and microdata from india and thailand we examine how women s work status changes with economic development several clear patterns emerge women s labor force participation first declines and then rises with development women move from work in family enterprises to work as paid employees fertility declines and gender gaps in education narrow women s education levels and those of their spouses appear to be important determinants of women s labor market activities broad welfare indicators such as mortality rates and education levels indicate that women s well being improves on average with development both in absolute terms and relative to men

women s changing participation in the labor force a world perspective this paper describes how the composition of the labor force changes with economic development it considers recent trends in women s labor force participation and the type of jobs held in various sectors as national per capita income increases the paper notes that women are more likely to work in the family or informal labor market if the labor costs to firms exceed the opportunity costs of female labor to family enterprises firms are at a relative disadvantage compared with families in the employment of less experienced and less skilled labor presumably because their labor costs are affected by such regulations as minimum wage social insurance premiums and limits on firing in asia and africa an increase in the proportion of employment in firms within the major sectors accounts for most of the rapid growth in women s overall share of wage employment in latin america however growth in the proportion of firm employment has been slower than elsewhere and the share of women in wage employment has even fallen overall in several countries it is not unreasonable to assume that women have lost more than men from market regulations and distortions but little research has addressed this proposition if it is true however these interventions in the labor market may be responsible for slowing women s transition from nonmarket and family work to firm employment this in turn may affect the rate and structure of economic growth

the economics of price scissors comment in a recent issue of this review 1984 raaj kumar sah and joseph stiglitz model the impact of shifts in the agriculture industry terms of trade on industrial accumulation and social welfare the intersectoral terms of trade they note was a key issue in the soviet industrialization debate of the 1920 s and continues to be an important issue in contemporary less developed countries one seemingly surprising implication of the sah stiglitz model is that a shift in the terms of trade against agriculture increases industrial accumulation despite or rather because of a normal agricultural supply response in their model a price induced decline in marketed agricultural surplus requires depression of industrial wages in order to reequilibrate urban food demand with supply at the lower relative food price the income and substitution effects of these wage and price changes lower urban consumption demand for industrial goods together with agriculture s reduced purchasing power this lower urban demand leads to the price scissors induced increase in investable surplus out of industrial production thus emerges the strong sah stiglitz result which they label preobrazhensky s first proposition that the more elastic is agricultural supply response the more wages must be depressed in equilibrium and the more effectively plice scissors work to increase accumulation see their equation 15 apparently the traditional preoccupation with agricultural supply response including preobrazhensky s 2 is wrong headed and backwards but it is argued here that this result obtains only under rather special labor supply and investable surplus assumptions which conform to neither the constraints of the soviet industrialization debate nor to most contemporary less developed countries 3

employment transitions of women in india a panel analysis abstract this study analyses employment transitions of working age women in india the puzzling issue of low labour force participation despite substantial economic growth strong fertility decline and expanding female education in india has been studied in the recent literature however no study so far has looked into the dynamics of employment in terms of labour force entry and exit in this context using a nationally representative panel dataset we show that women are not only participating less in the labour force but also dropping out at an alarming rate we estimate an endogenous switching model that corrects for selection bias due to initial employment and panel attrition to investigate the determinants of women s entry into and exit from employment we find that an increase in wealth and income of other members of the household leads to lower entry and higher exit probabilities of women along with the effects of caste and religion this result reveals the importance of cultural and economic factors in explaining the low workforce participation of women in india we also explore other individual and household level determinants of women s employment transitions moreover we find that a large public workfare program significantly reduces women s exit from the labour force our study indicates that women s entry and exit decisions are not necessarily symmetric and it is important to consider the inter temporal dependence of labour supply decisions

u shaped female labor participation with economic development some panel data evidence abstract using a panel data of about 130 countries from 1950 to 1980 we use dynamic panel data estimation to demonstrate that the u shaped relationship between feminization of the labor force and real gdp per capita holds up as an intertemporal relationship

changes in the labor supply behavior of married women 1980 2000 using march current population survey data we investigate married women s labor supply from 1980 to 2000 we find a large rightward shift in their labor supply function for annual hours in the 1980s with little shift in the 1990s these shifts account for most of the slowdown in the growth of labor supply during this period a major development was the dramatic decrease in the responsiveness of married women s labor supply to their own and husbands wages their own wage elasticity fell by 50 56 while their cross wage elasticity fell by 38 47 in absolute value

intercountry comparisons of labor force trends and of related developments an overview this paper is a survey of analyses of women s labor force growth in 12 industrialized countries originally presented at a conference in sussex england in june 1983 the main focus of the conference papers and of the current survey is on growth of the labor force of married women in the years 1960 80 trends in fertility wages and family instability also receive attention as related developments married women s labor force growth is observed in all countries except for the ussr after 1970 where labor force rates of women reached the level of men growth rates differ among countries they apparently respond to growth in real wages and to growth in education but response elasticities differ among countries estimates of these elasticities contained in the country papers were helpful in predicting the trends other findings include ubiquitous declines in fertility and growth of divorce in the 1970s both developments are related to long run labor force growth in all countries wages of women were lo

female labor supply why is the united states falling behind abstract in 1990 the us had the sixth highest female labor participation rate among 22 oecd countries by 2010 its rank had fallen to seventeenth we find that the expansion of family friendly p

why is the labour force participation of women declining in india summary this paper explores the recent fall in female labour force participation and its socio economic determinants in india the major contribution of this paper is to explore both micro and macro level factors which determine female labour force participation rate lfpr to examine the u shape female lfpr by examining the likely income and substitution effects of the real wage increase to identify the sub sectors within manufacturing and service sectors that could create jobs for new female job aspirants and those older women displaced from agriculture in recent years and thus to understand the conditions under which female lfpr could be raised using both macro level and household survey nss data we find that the recent fillip in the process of structural transformation has pushed a large number of females out of agriculture the growing mechanization in agriculture and rising capital intensity in manufacturing sectors together have limited the opportunity for females because of their low education and skill and due to other cultural constraints we also found that the rise in real wages in rural areas and the consequent improvement in the standard of living has produced a strong negative income effect which outweighs the positive substitution effect and as a result female lfpr has declined substantially however with the massive increase in female enrollment in secondary and higher levels of education it could be expected that the substitution effect of the increase in real wage would become stronger if appropriate measures are taken by the government which are suggested

trade contraction and employment in india and south africa during the global crisis summary the paper estimates the effects of the 2008 09 trade contraction on employment in india and south africa using social accounting matrices sams in a leontief multiplier model employment results are presented at aggregate and industry levels and examine gender and skills biases the most notable finding is that india and south africa experienced substantial employment declines as a result of trade contraction with the european union and the united states a large share of these declines occurred in the non tradable sector and resulted from income induced effects illustrating how a shock originating in the tradable goods sector had strong ripple effects throughout these economies

shifts over time and regional variation in women s labor force participation rates in a developing economy abstract in this study an attempt is made a to explain the decline and the inter area variation in women s activity rates in greece during the process of its economic development b to ascertain if there were any shifts in the relevant relationships over time and c to estimate women s hidden unemployment the decline in activity rates was explained with the help of the hypothesis of a u shaped impact of economic development on them among the most important findings were the considerable discouraging effect on labor force participation of unemployment and the negative impact of education women s hidden unemployment was found to be two to three times larger than reported unemployment

the economics of price scissors reply the question of how the funds required for the capital accumulation associated with industrialization are to be raised has a long history since the industrial sector is relatively small in the early stages of industrialization there has been a presumption that funds must primarily come fromi the agricultural sector the issue has been how best to extract these funds what are the effects of such a resource transfer what is the nature of the limits on the amounts to be extracted and whether in this process it is desirable or necessary to squeeze simultaneously the urban proletariat in our 1984 paper we presented a simple model of a closed socialist economy in which the instruments at the disposal of the government are the terms of trade the relative price of the agricultural good in terms of the industrial good and the industrial wage which we believe sheds some light on these questions particularly in the context of the soviet industrialization debate this model is part of a larger research program in which we have examined similar questions in the context of economnies under a variety of trade regimes with a variety of institutional structures with and without heterogeneity among individuals within a sector with and without the disaggregation of commodities produced in each of the two sectors with and without migration where the government has at its disposal other policy instruments where wages in the urban sector are determined in a variety of ways and in which wages and prices may affect the productivity of workers the reason for examining a variety of economic structures is obvious as the past experience of economic development has shown there is an enormous diversity in the salient features of developing countries and in the set of policy instruments that a government can or cannot employ among our objectives have been i to examine a range of models emphasizing diflerent sets of structural features in part to ascertain which features are central to answering the questions at hand and ii to develop general reduced form relationships to describe specific parts of the economy for instance to represent the migration mechanism and the urban wage determination and to show that the central results depend only on the properties of these reduced form relationships the issues raised by ake blomqvist and michael carter in their comments 1986 are primarily interpretative they contend that our simple model of a socialist economy is not an appropriate vehicle for examining certain propositions which the soviet economist evgeny preobrazhensky advanced during the soviet debate instead carter argues for an open economy specification and for a particular type of wage productivity effect blomqvist on the other hand favors a specification in which the government can set different prices in two sectors we have referred to the problem of analyzing differential prices or taxes in the two sectors as that of urban rural pricing in contrast to the price scissors problem where both sectors face the same prices as the commentators are aware we have analyzed these and more general specifications in our 1985a and 1983 papers respectively since it is not possible to present a full analysis within this short reply we briefly describe some of the qualitative features of price scissors within a simple framework so that one can see certain implications of alternative assumptions we then turn to the more doctrinal and yale university new haven ct 06520 and princeton university princeton nj 08544 respectively see our studies 1983 1984 1985a b c 1986 an empirical framework for analyzing urban rural pricing issues in a multiperson multicommodity context was developed in sah 1982 related models have been employed by avishay braverman et al 1984 and others

what explains the stagnation of female labor force participation in urban india female labor force participation rates in urban india between 1987 and 2011 are surprisingly low and have stagnated since the late 1980s despite rising growth fertility decline and rising wages and education levels married women s labor force participation hovered around 18 percent analysis of five large cross sectional micro surveys shows that a combination of supply and demand effects have contributed to this stagnation the main supply side factors are rising household incomes and husband s education as well as the falling selectivity of highly educated women on the demand side the sectors that draw in female workers have expanded least so that changes in the sectoral structure of employment alone would have actually led to declining participation rates

a comparison of the labor force behavior of married women in the united states and canada with special attention to the impact of income taxes estimation results are presented for the probability of working the hourly wage rate and the annual hours of work for wives in seven different age groups in both the u s and canada federal and state or provincial taxes are incorporated into the analysis an iterative estimation method is employed to circumvent the statistical problems resulting from the dependence of the hours of work on the tax rate and the dependence of the tax rate on the hours of work authors

the social cost of labor and project evaluation a general approach abstract this paper presents a general framework for analyzing shadow wages in ldcs we focus on i the differences between the domestic and international prices ii the equilibrating mechanisms in the economy iii the endogeneity of earnings in industry and agriculture iv the consequences of industrial employment creation on agriculture and v the nature of migration and unemployment we identify those reduced form relationships which are central in determining the shadow wage and use them to obtain general formulae for the shadow wage these formulae can be specialized to alternative technological behavioral and institutional settings this yields many new results concerning the relationship between the shadow wage and the market wage also earlier results on shadow wages are derived as special cases of our formulae

female labor force participation in japan an aggregate model this paper extends previous work on labor supply in japan by treating the simultaneous labor force participation and hours of work decisions for japanese wives both employees and family workers it estimates a trichotomous participation model for a

the incredible shrinking elasticities married female labor supply 1978 2002 this paper demonstrates the extent to which married women s labor supply elasticities have changed over the past quarter century estimates from march current population survey data suggest that these elasticities have decreased substantially by 60 percent for the hours wage elasticity from 0 36 to 0 14 70 percent for the hours income elasticity from 0 053 to 0 015 95 percent for the participation wage elasticity from 0 66 to 0 03 and 60 percent for the participation income elasticity from 0 13 to 0 05 changing demographic characteristics explain little of the drop in these elasticities suggesting that preferences toward work have changed across birth cohorts

women as agents of change female income and mobility in india economic globalization will give many women in developing countries access to steady and relatively remunerative employment for the first time potentially shifting bargaining power within their households and changing the choices that are made for their children this paper exploits a unique setting a group of tea plantations in south india where women are employed in permanent wage labor and where incomes do not vary by caste to anticipate the impact of globalization on mobility across social groups in the future the main result of the paper is that a relative increase in female income weakens the family s ties to the ancestral community and the traditional economy but these mobility enhancing effects are obtained for certain historically disadvantaged castes alone although the paper provides a context specific explanation for why the women from these castes emerge as agents of change the first general implication of the analysis is that the incentive and the ability of women to use their earnings to influence household decisions depends importantly on their social background the second implication is that historically disadvantaged groups may in fact be especially responsive to new opportunities precisely because they have fewer ties to the traditional economy to hold them back

when grilli and yang meet prebisch and singer piecewise linear trends in primary commodity prices abstract in this study we test the prebisch singer hypothesis on the secular decline of relative primary commodity prices with the extended grilli and yang 1988 data set ending at 2010 rather than asking whether it holds for the whole sample period we examine if the hypothesis holds sometimes during the sample period by estimating the piecewise linear trends of primary commodity prices we employ the new l1 trend filtering proposed by kim et al 2009 to estimate the piecewise linear trends we find that the prebisch singer hypothesis holds sometimes but not always for many of the primary commodities in the grilli yang data the strength of the prebisch singer hypothesis has become substantially weaker recently as the relative prices of many primary commodities have increased sharply since around 2000

more on the labour supply of canadian women the traditional consensus on female labour supply is that the wage elasticity is large and positive in contrast to a small and generally negative elasticity for males this consensus has recently been challenged in a series of important papers by alice and masao nakamura who find a backward bending supply curve for females similar to that for males this result has been challenged on a variety of grounds the present paper tests the hypothesis advanced by the nakamuras on data that have several advantages over the census type in their papers the results offer strong support for the nakamuras conclusions

time series growth in the female labor force in this paper we investigate the reasons for the growth in the female labor force in america during the twentieth century in our research we study the longer term trends since 1900 and conduct a more intensive examination of developments after the second world war on the basis of our work we conclude that rising real wages accounted for 60 of the total growth in the female labor force half of this wage effect in expanding labor supply was the fertility reducing consequence of a higher female wage