Married women in the United States are increasingly integral to their families' economic well-being. With two-earner families becoming the norm, little research investigates the role of wives in family income mobility. How much does a wife's labor market activity matter in her family's ability...

Personal taxes and benefits affect the incentive to work over the lifecycle by altering income-age profiles, insuring against adverse shocks, and changing the returns to human capital. Previous work investigating the impact of taxes and benefits on work incentives has tended to ignore these...

Wage growth occurs almost exclusively in full-time work, whereas it is close to zero in part-time work. German women, when asked to predict their own potential wage outcomes, show severely biased expectations with strong over-optimism about the returns to part-time experience. We estimate a...

In this paper we compare gender differences in the allocation of time to market work, domestic work, child care, and leisure over the life cycle. Time use profiles for these activity categories are constructed on survey data for three countries: Australia, the UK and Germany. We discuss the...

The pattern of joining the labor force only at an advanced stage of the life-cycle was widespread among American women in the 1960s and 1970s, but not since the 1980s. To explain this change we conduct a theoretical analysis of the interrelation between women's lifetime labor supply choices and...

Two particular features of the position of women in the British labour market are the extensive role of part-time work and the large part-time pay penalty. Part-time work features most prominently when women are in their 30s, the peak childcare years and, particularly for more educated women, a...

Using 1970, 1980, and 1990 U.S. census data, the author examines the life-cycle patterns of immigrant women's labor force participation. He finds that the cross-sectional approach that has been used in all previous studies leads to a substantial over-estimate of the degree to which immigrant...

While American women's employment rates fall in the years after they have a child, their self-employment rates do not. These contrasting patterns may be explained by the fact that self-employed women often have more control over their work schedule, hours, and location than wage and salary...