We ask whether women's decisions to be in the labor force may be affected by the decisions of other women in ways not captured by standard models. We develop a model that augments the simple neoclassical framework by introducing relative income concerns into women's (or families') utility...

Civil rights legislation of the 1960s made it illegal foran employer to pay men and women on different bases for the same work or to discriminate against women in hiring, job assignment, or promotion. Two decades later, however, the ratio of women's to men's earnings has shown little upward...

Using data from the 1997 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY-97), we examine the effects of California's first in the nation government-mandated paid family leave program (CA-PFL) on mothers' and fathers' use of leave during the period surrounding child birth, and on the...

This analysis uses March Current Population Survey data from 1999-2010 and a differences-in-differences approach to examine how California's first in the nation paid family leave (PFL) program affected leave-taking by mothers following childbirth, as well as subsequent labor market outcomes. We...

Sex-related wage differentials are almost universal. Economists traditionally tend to attribute a major fraction of the differential to the difference in on-the-job training. This difference is in turn often explained by the lower profitability of this investment for women who plan to interrupt...

Of all the changes in the history of women's market work, few have been more impressive than the rapid emergence and feminization of the clerical sector and the related decline in manufacturing employment for women. Although a century ago few women were clerical workers, as early as 1920 22% of...

Single women in the U.S. dominated the female labor force from 1870 to 1920. Data on the home life and working conditions of women in 1888 and 1907 enable the estimation of earnings functions. Work in the manufacturing sector for these women was task oriented and payment was frequently by the...