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My dissertation examines interactions between recent macroeconomic trends in the labor market, including technological change and structural transformation, and changes in female labor supply.
In Chapter 1, I investigate the role of factors affecting female labor supply, such as social norms and discrimination, in the decline of routine jobs in the U.S. since the 1970’s. While typically attributed to changes in labor demand, the decline in routine employment has been larger for women than men, reflecting a shift of female employment out of routine clerical jobs and into non-routine professions. This paper presents a quantitative analysis of the impact of falling labor market distortions faced by women in explaining the trend. One observable manifestation of these falling distortions is the Quiet Revolution, which refers to a shift in women's life cycle labor force attachment from intermittent to continuous after 1970; it spurred the rise of female non-routine employment because these are long-term careers that reward experience. I develop and calibrate an equilibrium model of the labor market featuring the Quiet Revolution, discrimination, and improvement in automation. Counterfactual analyses reveal that the Quiet Revolution and reduced discrimination explain 21% and 59%, respectively, of the growth of non-routine relative to routine white-collar employment among women between 1970 and 2000. Together, they explain 36% of the aggregate increase, while automation explains 56%. Finally, the Quiet Revolution raised output per worker by 3% via increased female experience.
Chapter 2 (co-authored with Michael Peters, Pamela Torola, and Fabrizio Zilibotti) is motivated by the fact that despite a tripling of India's GDP per capita between 1987 and 2019, coindicing with rapid urbanization, female labor force participation (FLFP) actually declined. Consistent with this observation, we document a pronounced urban-rural participation gap, where FLFP is higher in poorer, rural labor markets. Using time-use data, we show that this is primarily driven by an extensive margin: in rural districts, women often engage in part-time activities, typically related to agriculture and informal family businesses. These activities are less common in urban areas, where some women take formal jobs, but a larger share withdraws from the labor market to focus on home production. We propose and estimate a model of household labor supply that aligns with these trends. The main drivers of the urban-rural participation gap are higher spousal incomes in cities, which reduce the marginal utility of female labor, and labor market distortions that depress women's urban wages below their marginal product. Counterfactual simulations show that economic growth is unlikely to provide a sharp reversal of this trend in future decades unless it is accompanied by changes in gender norms and labor market institutions.
Chapter 3 (co-authored with Paula Calvo and Ilse Lindenlaub) documents novel findings on the relationship between marriage market sorting and intra-household decision-making on consumption and labor supply using data from a new survey we designed for the German Socio-Economic Panel. First, we find that households tend to allocate more private consumption to the female partner when she is at least as educated as the male partner. Second, while women are in general more likely to experience career disruptions at the time of childbearing (over 50% of women do, vs. only 5% of men), women are significantly less likely to experience a disruption when they are more educated than their male partners. The data allow us to document a novel link between both outcomes: women with a higher labor market attachment after having children are also more likely to benefit from a higher share of household resources, even years later.