IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedmoi/99403.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Changing Business Cycles: The Role of Women’s Employment

Author

Listed:
  • Stefania Albanesi

Abstract

Women’s labor force participation rose rapidly in the post-war period in the United States until the mid-1990s when it flattened out. I examine the impact of this change in trend in female labor supply on aggregate business cycles both empirically and with a quantitative real business cycle model that incorporates gender differences. I show that the rise in women’s participation played a substantial role in the Great Moderation, and not allowing for gender differences leads to incorrect inference on the sources of this phenomenon. I also show that the discontinued growth in female labor supply starting in the 1990s played a substantial role in the jobless recoveries following the 1990-1991, 2001 and 2007-2009 recessions. Moreover, it reduced aggregate hours and output growth during the late 1990s and mid 2000s expansions. I also find that the growth in women’s employment added substantially to TFP growth. These results suggest that continued sustained growth in women’s employment after the early 1990s would have significantly improved economic performance in the United States.

Suggested Citation

  • Stefania Albanesi, 2025. "Changing Business Cycles: The Role of Women’s Employment," Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute Working Papers 109, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
  • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedmoi:99403
    DOI: 10.21034/iwp.109
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.minneapolisfed.org/institute/working-papers-institute/iwp109.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.21034/iwp.109?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Women's employment; Business cycles; Great moderation; Jobless recoveries;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E17 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General Aggregative Models - - - Forecasting and Simulation: Models and Applications
    • E32 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Business Fluctuations; Cycles
    • E37 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Forecasting and Simulation: Models and Applications
    • J11 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Demographic Trends, Macroeconomic Effects, and Forecasts
    • J21 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Labor Force and Employment, Size, and Structure

    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:fip:fedmoi:99403. 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: Kate Hansel (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cfrbmus.html .

    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.