Determinants of Labor Force Participation of Older Married Men in Taiwan

As the proportion of older population increases in Taiwan, issues related to older individuals' labor market behavior attract public attention. During 1988 to 2008, labor force participation rate of older married men declined about 10 percentage points. This paper tries to identify the determinants of older married men's labor force participation in Taiwan. We use data from Manpower Survey and Manpower Utilization Survey from 1988 to 2008. The sample comprises 51,730 observations of married men aged 55-64. Decompositions with methodologies of Oaxaca (1973) and DiNardo et al. (1996) are conducted for explaining the decline in labor participation rate of older married men. The results indicate that the increase in wives' labor force participation increases husband's likelihood of participation and has prevented aggregate husbands' participation rate from declining to the extent of about 1 percentage point. However, regional unemployment rate negatively affects husbands' likelihood of participation and explains at least 3.5 percentage points of the total decline in husbands' participation rate.