Employment and participation rates for US prime age women rose steadily during the second half of the 20th century. In the last 30 years, however, those rates stagnated, even as employment and participation rates for women in other industrialized countries continued to rise. I discuss the role...

This article examines the trends in women's economic outcomes in the United States focusing primarily on labor force participation, occupational attainment, and the gender wage gap. The author first highlights considerable progress on all dimensions prior to the 1990s followed by a slowing or...

Meaningful discussions about women at the top' can take place today only because a quiet revolution occurred about thirty years ago. The transformation was startlingly rapid and was accomplished by the unwitting foot soldiers of an upheaval that transformed the workforce. It can be seen in a...

We document the time-series of employment rates and hours worked per employed by married couples in the US and seven European countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the UK) from the early 1980s through 2016. Relying on a model of joint household labor supply...

We provide the first systematic account of summer declines in women's labor market activity. From May to July, the employment-to-population ratio among prime-age US women declines by 1.1 percentage points, whereas male employment rises; women's total hours worked fall by 9.8 percent, more than...

We investigate women's fertility, labor and marriage market responses to a health innovation that led to reductions in mortality from treatable causes, and especially large declines in child mortality. We find delayed childbearing, with lower intensive and extensive margin fertility, a decline...

Women earn less than men, and that is especially true of mothers relative to fathers. Much of the widening occurs after family formation when mothers reduce their hours of work. But what happens when the kids grow up? To answer that question, we estimate three earning gaps: the "motherhood...

Gendered discrimination based on age and disability is a pressing issue, because this discrimination can interfere with the goal of lengthening work lives, especially for older women. In the United States, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act prohibit...

American women are working more, through their sixties and even into their seventies. Their increased participation at older ages started in the late 1980s before the turnaround in older men's labor force participation and the economic downturns of the 2000s. The higher labor force participation...

In this short note I simulate the DR under various conditions and make comparisons with the US. Japan has experienced a large increase in its DR because its fertility rate is low, its people are long lived and it has little immigration. Fertility is the largest of the contributors in Japan. If...