Low Labor Force Participation Research Articles

An exploratory study on low labour force participation of women in Sri Lanka

Despite gender parity in education favoring female and positive outcomes in female education, about two thirds of the working age women in Sri Lanka do not participate in the labor force and stay at home. This study sought to understand the share distribution and incidence of stay at home women with different levels of education attainment and to identify reasons for non-participation. The analysis was based on quantitative data from the 2014 Labor Force Survey and 2012/13 Household Income and Expenditure Surveys of the Department of Census and Statistics, and on qualitative data collected from interviews with labor market experts. Quantitative analysis shows that the largest share and the highest incidence of working age women who do not participate in the labour force are upper secondary school dropouts. The lowest share and incidence are among those with tertiary education. Though the share of stay at home women with lower education was low, incidence was high. Irrespective of educational attainment, being married and having a household income were significant factors explaining non-participation in the labor force. Labour force participation of the tertiary educated women was not affected by maternal status, ethno religious identity or labor market factors. The qualitative data suggests the important role of reservation wages in the labor force participation decision of upper secondary school dropouts. The absence of soft and hard skills required to access jobs, meeting their reservation wage levels and the absence of employment guidance tend to impede their participation in the labor force.

Employment transitions of women in India: A panel analysis

Abstract This study analyses employment transitions of working-age women in India. The puzzling issue of low labour force participation despite substantial economic growth, strong fertility decline and expanding female education in India has been studied in the recent literature. However, no study so far has looked into the dynamics of employment in terms of labour force entry and exit in this context. Using a nationally representative panel dataset, we show that women are not only participating less in the labour force, but also dropping out at an alarming rate. We estimate an endogenous switching model that corrects for selection bias due to initial employment and panel attrition, to investigate the determinants of women’s entry into and exit from employment. We find that an increase in wealth and income of other members of the household leads to lower entry and higher exit probabilities of women. Along with the effects of caste and religion, this result reveals the importance of cultural and economic factors in explaining the low workforce participation of women in India. We also explore other individual and household level determinants of women’s employment transitions. Moreover, we find that a large public workfare program significantly reduces women’s exit from the labour force. Our study indicates that women’s entry and exit decisions are not necessarily symmetric, and it is important to consider the inter-temporal dependence of labour supply decisions.

Living arrangements and older People's labor force participation in Hong Kong, 1986–2016

Using the 1% random sample of Hong Kong population census and by-census data (1986, 1991, 1996, 2001, 2006, 2011, 2016), we examine labor force participation (LFP) of older adults (aged 65+) and its association with living arrangements over a thirty-year span. Despite the large time period and the cohort variations in LFP, our cross-classified multilevel models (CCMM) showed a remarkably consistent linkage between the family context and older persons' LFP. Co-residence with adult children accompanies a lower level in older adults’ LPF, compared with living alone or with the spouse only, but the extent of the reduction depends on the marital status of the children. Those living with married children have the lowest LFP, but living with unmarried children, sons in particular, increases the likelihood of employment compared with living with married children. We discuss the findings in light of changing macroeconomic conditions, marriage trends, and Chinese cultural traditions in Hong Kong.

Low Female Labor Force Participation in Pakistan: Causes and Factors

Pakistan has the lowest Female Labour Force Participation (FLFP) rate in the South Asian region. The study has used the latest round of Labor Force Survey 2014-15 and analyzed the individual and household factors that are associated with low FLFP in Pakistan. This study finds that there is less probability for urban women to take part in labor force activities. At national and regional level higher secondary and above levels of education have positive and significant relationship with FLFP whereas the situation is different for the four provinces of Pakistan. In case of Punjab province graduation and above levels of education are positively affiliated with FLFP, in Sind province higher secondary and above levels of education are positively associated with FLFP, in KPK province, matric and above levels of education are positively influencing FLFP decisions and in Baluchistan province primary and above levels of education are positively influencing women's decisions to participate in labor force activities. Women living in joint family systems, non-migrated, recipient of technical or vocational trainings are also more likely to participate in labor force activities. The study provides useful insights for policy makers to formulate appropriate policies to increase FLFP rate in Pakistan.

Low Female Labor Force Participation in Pakistan: Causes and Factors

Low Female Labor Force Participation in Pakistan: Causes and Factors

Breastfeeding, schooling, and income: Insights from the Indonesian Family Life Survey.

Recent research has highlighted associations of breastfeeding with IQ, schooling, and income, but uncertainty about such links remains. The Indonesian Family Life Survey, representative of 83% of the Indonesian population, provides data on breastfeeding, parents' years of schooling, wealth, and other family characteristics in 1993-1994, as well as schooling and income in 2014-2015 for 5,421 children of those families. Using linear regressions and controlling for village or neighbourhood, as well as propensity score matching, we analysed breastfeeding associations for boys and girls separately, when regularly fed foods/beverages other than breast milk is significantly associated with years of schooling in 2014-2015 for girls, but not for boys, after controlling for the village or neighbourhood of residence in 1993-1994. For girls, ages 1 to 1.9, 2 to 2.9, 3 to 3.9, and >4months, relative to ages <1month, are associated with an additional 0.41 to 0.46years of schooling, with p values of 0.086, 0.071, 0.043, and 0.026, respectively. No comparable estimate for boys attains statistical significance. Using propensity score matching yields similar results. Associations with annual income in 2014-2015 are not statistically significant, either for all children, or for either sex. Our finding suggests that delaying regular feeding of foods/beverages other than breast milk beyond 1month may help girls' schooling but has no observable association with annual income, perhaps because of lower labour force participation by women. Also, the inclusion of controls for village or neighbourhood of residence reduces confounding.

Labor Market Effects of Credit Constraints: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

We exploit the 1998 and 2003 constitutional amendment in Texas—allowing home equity loans and lines of credit for non-housing purposes—as natural experiments to estimate the effect of easier credit access on the labor market. Using state-level as well as county-level data and the synthetic control approach, we find that easier access to housing credit led to a notably lower labor force participation rate between 1998 and 2007. We show that our findings are remarkably robust to improved synthetic control methods based on insights from machine-learning. We explore treatment effect heterogeneity using grouped data from the basic monthly CPS and find that declines in the labor force participation rate were larger among females, prime age individuals, and the college-educated. Analysis of March CPS data confirms that the negative effect of easier home equity access on labor force participation was largely concentrated among homeowners, with little discernible impact on renters, as expected. We find that, while the labor force participation rate experienced persistent declines following the amendments that allowed access to home equity, the impact on GDP growth was relatively muted. Our research shows that labor market effects of easier credit access should be an important factor when assessing its stimulative impact on overall growth.

FROM EMPTY PEWS TO EMPTY CRADLES: FERTILITY DECLINE AMONG EUROPEAN CATHOLICS

Abstract:Total fertility in the Catholic countries of Southern Europe has dropped to remarkably low rates (=1.4) despite continuing low rates female labor force participation and high historic fertility. We model three ways in whichreligionaffects the demand for children – through norms, market wages, and childrearing costs. We estimate these effects using new panel data on church attendance and clergy employment for 13 European countries from 1960 to 2000, spanning the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). Using nuns per capita as a proxy for service provision, we estimate fertility effects on the order of 300 to 400 children per nun. Moreover, nuns outperform priests as a predictor of fertility, suggesting that changes in childrearing costs dominate changes in theology and norms. Reduced church attendance also predicts fertility decline, but only for Catholics, not for Protestants. Service provision and attendance complement each other, a finding consistent with club models of religion.

The Role of Gender Role Attitudes and Immigrant Generation in Ethnic Minority Women\u2019s Labor Force Participation in Britain

Although substantial research shows that in Britain some ethnic minority women have significantly lower labor force participation (LFP) rates than White British women, even after controlling for demographic characteristics and education levels, little is known about the reasons underlying the remaining ethnic differences. Using nationally representative data (2010–2011), I investigate the role of gender role attitudes in explaining the ethnic as well as generational differences in women’s LFP rates. The results show that after controlling for demographic characteristics and education levels, LFP rates of Pakistani and Bangladeshi women are significantly lower than that of White British women and about half of the ethnic gap can be explained by differences in gender role attitudes. Moreover, I show that the ethnic gap is less pronounced for second generation Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Indian women whose LFP rates are significantly higher than those of their first generation counterparts. Importantly, the higher LFP rates of second generation South Asian women can be largely explained by their relatively less traditional gender role attitudes. Drawing on my results, public policies could provide appropriate childcare services and flexible work arrangements to alter traditional gender role attitudes, thereby improving minority women’s labor market opportunities.

Trends in health and retirement in Latin America: Are older workers healthy enough to extend their working lives?

Abstract To counter the problems of demographic ageing, Latin American countries, like many nations elsewhere, are considering raising the retirement age in order to maintain fiscal balance and sustain economic prosperity. In doing so, however, they must take into account not only the simultaneous decline in older adults’ labour force participation but also poor health among those potentially affected by the change. In this paper, we use country comparable census data for 1970–2010 to analyse the labour force participation trends and health of male workers aged 50 years and over in Latin American countries. Our analysis focuses on two important health indicators: mortality risk and overall disease burden. We find that the greatly improved health conditions of recent years translate into lower labour force participation today than in the past, so that although contemporary male workers aged 55–59 have similar health statuses to their earlier counterparts aged 60–64, their patterns of labour force participation are very different. We therefore conclude that, overall, health does not present a barrier to raising the retirement age in Latin America, even in the longer term.

Unequal hopes and lives in the USA: optimism, race, place, and premature mortality

The 2016 election highlighted deep divisions in the USA, and exposed unhappiness and frustration among poor and uneducated whites. The starkest marker of this unhappiness is the rise in preventable deaths and suicides among the middle aged of this cohort. In contrast, minorities have much higher levels of optimism, and their life expectancies continue to rise. Low-income respondents display the largest differences, with poor blacks by far the most optimistic, and poor rural whites the least. African Americans and Hispanics also have higher life satisfaction and lower stress incidence than poor whites. The gaps across racial groups peak in middle age, at the nadir of the U-curve of age and life satisfaction. We explored the association between our subjective well-being data and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) mortality data. We find that the absence of hope among less than college-educated whites matches the trends in premature mortality among 35–64-year-olds. Reported pain, reliance on disability insurance, low labor force participation, and differential levels of resilience across races all have mediating effects in the desperation-mortality associations. We also explore the role of place, and map the states associated with higher/lower indicators of well-being for these different cohorts. The matches between indicators of well-being and of mortality suggest that the former could serve as warning indicators of ill-being in the future, rather than waiting for rising mortality to sound the alarms.

Female employment status: a survey analysis of selected member states of the Arab League

Low female labor force participation is a conspicuous issue in the literature. Based on this information, women’s perspectives of the determinants of female labor force participation in 13 member states of the Arab League in relation to the region’s patriarchal culture and conservative social norms are discussed in this paper. Probit modelling is applied to the sixth wave of the World Values Survey data (2010–2014), in order to examine the relationship between female labor force participation and socio-cultural variables, such as women’s perceptions about the importance of religion, the priority of religion compared with science, the importance of traditions for women, the priority of men concerning the right to a job and the importance of a job for women’s independence, and personal characteristics, such as women’s social class, marital status, number of children, educational level and age. The results indicate that the number of children and the importance given to tradition and religion by women are obstacles to increasing their labor force participation.

Misperceived Social Norms: Female Labor Force Participation in Saudi Arabia

Through the custom of guardianship, husbands typically have the final word on their wives’ labor supply decisions in Saudi Arabia, a country with very low female labor force participation (FLFP). We provide incentivized evidence (both from an experimental sample in Riyadh and from a national sample) that the vast majority of young married men in Saudi Arabia privately support FLFP outside of home from a normative perspective, while they substantially underestimate the level of support for FLFP by other similar men – even men from their same social setting, such as their neighbors. We then show that randomly correcting these beliefs about others increases married men’s willingness to let their wives join the labor force (as measured by their costly sign-up for a job-matching service for their wives). Finally, we find that this decision maps onto real outcomes: four months after the main intervention, the wives of men in our original sample whose beliefs about acceptability of FLFP were corrected are more likely to have applied and interviewed for a job outside of home. Together, our evidence indicates a potentially important source of labor market frictions, where job search is underprovided due to misperceived social norms.

Understanding low female labour force participation: Policy evaluation using microsimulation

We project medium to long term trends in labour force participation and employment for selected low-participation EU countries (Italy, Spain, Ireland, Hungary and Greece), with Sweden as a benchmark, by means of a dynamic microsimulation model. By exploring alternative scenarios to our baseline forecasts and their implications for GDP growth, we find that the gap between male and female participation is mostly explained by (i) differences in the individual conditional behaviour of older female cohorts, (ii) inadequate family policies. In particular, our results show that the conditional behaviour of younger women in the low-participation countries is similar to that in Sweden. In a nutshell, what is needed is not a change of behaviour on the side of women but a change of mentality on the side of institutions and firms.

Labor Market Effects of Credit Constraints: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

We exploit the 1998 and 2003 constitutional amendment in Texas?allowing home equity loans and lines of credit for non-housing purposes?as natural experiments to estimate the effect of easier credit access on the labor market. Using state-level as well as county-level data and the synthetic control approach, we find that easier access to housing credit led to a notably lower labor force participation rate between 1998 and 2007. We show that our findings are remarkably robust to improved synthetic control methods based on insights from machine-learning. We explore treatment effect heterogeneity using grouped data from the basic monthly CPS and find that declines in the labor force participation rate were larger among females, prime age individuals, and the college-educated. Analysis of March CPS data confirms that the negative effect of easier home equity access on labor force participation was largely concentrated among homeowners, with little discernible impact on renters, as expected. We find that, while the labor force participation rate experienced persistent declines following the amendments that allowed access to home equity, the impact on GDP growth was relatively muted. Our research shows that labor market effects of easier credit access should be an important factor when assessing its stimulative impact on overall growth.

THE ROLE OF INSTITUTIONS IN DETERMINING SAVING RATES: CASE STUDY FROM TURKEY

There exist numerous factors affecting saving rates in an economy such as demographics factors, economic factors as well as institutional factors. Therefore, the role of the institutions that we focus on in this paper is extremely critical for savings rates in an economy and so, economic growth. For Turkey, despite of the fact that the role of financial system is incontrovertible in determining the savings, as an informal institution, the role of culture should also be considered as one of the determinants of savings rates since it has direct or indirect impact on almost all variables determining saving rates. In fact, we see that relatively lower labor force participation rate for females and the lower trust index in Turkey, which they have been influenced by the cultural structure of society in Turkey, somehow matter in determining saving rates in Turkey. Normal 0 21 false false false TR JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Normal Tablo"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Calibri;} Accordingly, the relatively low savings rate in Turkish Economy reveals that the Turkish economy needs some measures to increase this lower rate. However, while some of these measures should be taken in the short-run, some should not, as in the case of cultural structure.

The Incompatibility of the Pension System and the Labour Market in Turkey

The Turkish welfare regime has witnessed a rapid transformation over the past two decades. While healthcare and social assistance have been studied in detail, we still know relatively little about the 1999 and 2008 pension reforms and their effects. Instead of examining the Turkish pension system in isolation, this article investigates the institutional compatibility of the pension system and the labour market in Turkey. The need for an institutional compatibility analysis arises because pension entitlements are largely defined by employment status. Based on an analysis of descriptive statistics, laws and other relevant documents, the article argues that neither the pre- nor post-reform pension system is compatible with the labour market structure in Turkey due to low labour force participation, high (youth) unemployment and high informal employment.

Projection of the Output Cost Arising from Low Labour Force Participation of Women in North Cyprus

The relationship between gender inequality and economic growth has become one of the most interesting and debated issues both in the academic literature and the policy arena. The aim of this study is to investigate how gender inequalities in the labour force participation (LFP) in North Cyprus undermine the per capita output of the country. Thus, the study is designed to estimate the simulation of a possible increase in per capita GDP based on 2011 data generated by the catch up of north female labour force participation rates to the south for the year 2011. Different age categories for female labour force are considered for the measurement. The age categories distributed within the working age population including female labour force population between the ages 15 and over. The age categories are divided into 5 groups as including the female participants between the age from 15 to 24, 25 to 34, 35 to 44, 45 to 54, and 55 and over. Data used is obtained from the State Planning Organization (SPO) of North Cyprus government for North Cyprus and from the World Bank database for South Cyprus. The North Cyprus labour force participation rates are adjusted to the south as suggested by Bryant et. al. (2004). Parallel to the previous literature, it is found that female labour force participation (FLFP) rate has a positive impact on GDP in North Cyprus. There would have been a 4% higher per capita GDP with the catch up of north to south FLFP rate which might be a substantial contribution towards decreasing the income gap between north and south.

Every Breath You Take—Every Dollar You’ll Make: The Long-Term Consequences of the Clean Air Act of 1970

This paper examines the long-term impacts of early childhood exposure to air pollution on adult outcomes using US administrative data. We exploit changes in air pollution driven by the 1970 Clean Air Act to analyze the difference in outcomes between cohorts born in counties before and after large improvements in air pollution relative to those same cohorts born in counties that had no improvements. We find a significant relationship between pollution exposure in the year of birth and later-life outcomes. A higher pollution level in the year of birth is associated with lower labor force participation and lower earnings at age 30.

Decomposing culture: an analysis of gender, language, and labor supply in the household

Despite broad progress in closing many dimensions of the gender gap around the globe, recent research has shown that traditional gender roles can still exert a large influence on female labor force participation, even in developed economies. This paper empirically analyzes the role of culture in determining the labor market engagement of women within the context of collective models of household decision making. In particular, we use the epidemiological approach to study the relationship between gender in language and labor market participation among married female immigrants to the U.S. We show that the presence of gender in language can act as a marker for culturally acquired gender roles and that these roles are important determinants of household labor allocations. Female immigrants who speak a language with sex-based grammatical rules exhibit lower labor force participation, hours worked, and weeks worked. Our strategy of isolating one component of culture reveals that roughly two thirds of this relationship can be explained by correlated cultural factors, including the role of bargaining power in the household, and the impact of ethnic enclaves and that at most one third is potentially explained by language having a causal impact.