Moonlighting Over The Business Cycle

Using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we examine the cyclicality of moonlighting by gender. We estimate a random‐effects Tobit model of moonlighting among working men and women and find that while male moonlighting behavior does not fluctuate significantly with the business cycle, female moonlighting does. The cyclicality of female moonlighting has, nonetheless, varied over the course of the past 35 yr. Female moonlighting seemed to behave countercyclically during much of the 1980s and early 1990s, confirming the popular media belief that moonlighting is more likely to occur during periods of economic distress. Yet, this countercyclical behavior disappears during the 1993–1999 period to become procyclical by the early twentieth century. The recent procyclicality of female moonlighting supports the idea that female workers respond to a need for “just‐in‐time” employment following the economic upturn of the mid‐ to late 1990s. (JEL J2, E32)