The rise and spread of female labour force participation at the US county level

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 2011, Fogli and Veldkamp adopted a time–space recursive spatial econometric model to investigate whether the female labour force participation rate varies with past participation rates in their own and in contiguous US counties, based on decennial data over the period 1940–2000, but their results are problematic. The applied estimators are different from the provided descriptions, the predicted contributions of the control variables are not in line with expectations, and the coefficients of the temporal and spatiotemporal lags of the dependent variable indicate instability. This replication study demonstrates that a dynamic spatial econometric model with common factors yields more convincing results in favour of the postulated model.