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Working Paper 2007-043C

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"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 two related little-noticed features of U.S. labor markets: (1) that there is currently substantial variation in the labor market participation rates and annual work hours of married women across cities, and (2) that the dramatic increase in married women's labor supply over the past 60 years has varied substantially across cities in timing and magnitude. 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.

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Category > Applied Microeconomics
Category > Regional Economics
Author > Natalia Kolesnikova