Explaining the High Labor Force Participation of Married Women from Asian Developing Countries

Abstract

We investigate the labor force participation rate of married women from Asian developing countries within a traditional labor supply model. Under this model, a woman works if the wages she receives if she works (her market wage) exceed the wage she must receive in order to work (her reservation wage). We show that the same factors that lead to higher labor force participation rates of native married women also lead to high labor force participation rates of Asian immigrant women. We also show that conditional on these factors, married Asian immigrant women have higher labor force participation rates than married native women, with the important exception of Japanese women. We investigate a number of hypotheses for this and conclude that a family’s intended permanence in the U.S. plays an important role.