Identifying the Causal Effect of Marriage on Women's Labor Force Participation in the Presence of Chinese Superstition

Marital status could be potentially correlated with women's labor force participation through unobservable factors. Using micro-data from the Chinese Population Census, this paper exploits exogenous variations in marriage caused by the Chinese Zodiac to estimate the causal effect of marital status on female labor force participation. As a result, the causality of marriage has been found for both rural and urban females in China, decreases the probability of female labor force participation by 46.4 percentage points and 30.7 percentage points, respectively.