Cultural change as learning: The evolution of female labor force participation over a century

R Fernández - American Economic Review, 2013 - aeaweb.org
American Economic Review, 2013aeaweb.org
This paper develops a learning model of cultural change to investigate why women's labor
force participation (LFP) and attitudes toward women's work both changed dramatically. In
the model, women's beliefs about the long-run payoff from working evolve endogenously via
an intergenerational learning process. This process generically generates the data's S-
shaped LFP curve and introduces a novel role for wage changes via their effect on the
speed of intergenerational learning. The calibrated model does a good job of replicating the …
Abstract
This paper develops a learning model of cultural change to investigate why women's labor force participation (LFP) and attitudes toward women's work both changed dramatically. In the model, women's beliefs about the long-run payoff from working evolve endogenously via an intergenerational learning process. This process generically generates the data's S-shaped LFP curve and introduces a novel role for wage changes via their effect on the speed of intergenerational learning. The calibrated model does a good job of replicating the evolution of female LFP in the United States over the last 120 years and finds that the new role for wages was quantitatively significant.
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