Accounting for Changes in Labor Force Participation of Married Women: The Case of the U.S. since 1959

Using a model of family decision-making with home production and individual heterogeneity, we quantitatively investigate the role of changes in several aspects of the joint earnings distribution of husbands and wives (gender earnings gap, gender-specific inequality and assortativeness of matching) and the decline in prices of home appliances in accounting for the dramatic rise in labor force participation of married women since 1959. The implications of the factors examined are tested against changes in participation for disaggregated groups of couples and leisure trends of married individuals, documented from the U.S. population census and time-use survey data.