Home > Working Papers

Working Paper 2007-043D

Search | View by Year | View by Category | View by Author

"Why Do So Few Women Work in New York (and So Many in Minneapolis)? Labor Supply of Married Women Across U.S. Cities"
by Dan Black, Natalia Kolesnikova, and Lowell J. Taylor

This paper documents a little-noticed features of U.S. labor markets – that there is very large variation in the labor market participation rates and annual work hours of married women across cities. We focus on cross-city differences in commuting times as a potential explanation for this variation in women's labor supply. Our starting point is the analysis of labor supply in a model in which commute times introduce non-convexities into the budget set. Empirical evidence appears consistent with the model's predictions: In the cross section, labor force participation rates of married women are negatively correlated with the metropolitan area commuting time. Our analysis also indicates that metropolitan areas which experienced relatively large increases in average commuting time from 1980 through 2000 had slower growth in the labor force participation of married women.

Full Text - Acrobat PDF (364k)

Notify Me of Updates for:
Category > Regional Economics
Category > Applied Microeconomics
Author > Natalia Kolesnikova