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SECTORAL CHANGES AND THE INCREASE IN WOMEN'S LABOR FORCE PARTICIPATION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2010

Rahşan Akbulut
Rahşan Akbulut*
Affiliation:
Pomona College
*
Address correspondence to: Rahşan Akbulut, The George L. Argyros School of Business and Economics, Chapman University, One University Dr., Orange, CA 92866, USA; e-mail: akbulut@chapman.edu.
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Abstract

Throughout the second half of the 20th century, women in the United States decided to move increasingly into the labor market. This paper investigates the growth of the service sector as an explanation for the increase in women's employment. It develops an economic model that can account for the increase in women's employment and the growth of the service sector at the same time. A growth model with two sectors and a home production technology is constructed in order to quantitatively assess the contribution of sectoral productivity differences to the change in women's employment decision. The sectoral productivities are taken from the data. This model demonstrates that a higher rate of productivity growth in market services compared to home services can account for a large fraction of the observed increase in women's labor supply from 1950 to 2005.

Keywords

Female Labor Force ParticipationHome ProductionMarketizationStructural Transformation
Type
Articles
Information
Macroeconomic Dynamics , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , April 2011 , pp. 240 - 264
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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