IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/restud/v63y1996i2p199-235..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Female Labour Supply and Marital Status Decisions: A Life-Cycle Model

Author

Listed:
  • Wilbert van der Klaauw

Abstract

This paper studies the interdependence between and the determinants of life-cycle marital status and labour force participation decisions of women. A dynamic utility maximization model is presented and estimated using longitudinal data on women from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. The MLE method employed, involves solving a dynamic programming problem. Further, a minimum distance estimator is proposed which allows for the incorporation of wage data in a computationally simple way. The estimates are used to predict changes in the life-cycle patterns of employment, marriage and divorce due to differences in education, race, the female's earnings and her (potential) husband's earnings. The estimation results indicate that the utility gains to marriage are decreasing in the female's wage rate and increasing in her (potential) husband's earnings, while the opposite is found for gains to working. Ignoring the endogeneity of marital status decisions is shown to lead to an underestimation of own and husband's wage effects on female labour supply.

Suggested Citation

  • Wilbert van der Klaauw, 1996. "Female Labour Supply and Marital Status Decisions: A Life-Cycle Model," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 63(2), pages 199-235.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:restud:v:63:y:1996:i:2:p:199-235.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.2307/2297850
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:restud:v:63:y:1996:i:2:p:199-235.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/restud .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.