Constrained Hours and Labour Market Employment by Married Women

Married women are likely to experience a constraint on the number of hours they work in the market. The effect of an hours constraint on female labour market employment, however, has not been widely reported in empirical studies, primarily due to data limitations, Recently available information found in the 1985 Interviewing Year of the Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics contains a wives’ survey which indicates whether the number of hours a woman worked in the market could be considered desired hours. For the most part, a failure to account for the presence of a constraint on the number of hours a married woman works in the market does not have a marked effect on the parameter estimates of the probability of employment obtained from fog it models. However, parameter estimates of the probability of employment obtained from a sample of women who consider themselves to be constrained in the number of hours worked differ from those obtained from a sample of women unconstrained in the hours worked.