Changes in women's willingness to work in a tightening labour market: the impact of preferences, wages and individual characteristics

The rapid increase of the female participation rate in the Netherlands gives rise to the hypothesis that the willingness of Dutch women to be employed grew strongly. We predict the number of hours women are willing to work by using the estimated parameters from a multistage least squares Heckit procedure. For a sample of Dutch women between 1994 and 1999 we find that there were significant differences in willingness to work between the employed, the unemployed, discouraged workers, and other non-participants. We also find a positive trend in the willingness to work for these groups, which seems to be almost entirely based on the changing individual characteristics of women, in particular the increase of the average level of education. Changing wages stimulated the working individuals, but had a negative effect on the willingness to work of the non-workers, who were on average lower educated. The effects of wages and preferences nearly outweighed each other for the non-workers.