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Transmission of preferences and beliefs about female labor market participation : direct evidence on the role of mothers

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  • Carro, Jesús M.
  • Machado, Matilde P.
  • Mora, Ricardo

Abstract

Recently, economists have established that culture—defined as a common set of preferences and beliefs —affects economic outcomes, including the levels of female labor force participation. Although this literature has argued that culture is transmitted from parents to children, it has also recognized the difficulty in empirically disentangling the parental transmission of preferences and/or beliefs from other confounding factors, such as technological change or investment in education. Using church registry data from the 18th and 19th centuries, our primary contribution is to interpret the effect of a mother’s labor participation status on that of her daughter as the mother-to-daughter transmission of preferences and/or beliefs that are isolated from confounding effects. Because our data are characterized by abundant non-ignorable missing information, we estimate the participation model and the missing process jointly by maximum likelihood. Our results reveal that the mother’s working status has a large and statistically significant positive effect on the daughter’s probability of working. These findings suggest that intergenerational family transmission of preferences and/or beliefs played a decisive role in the substantial increases in female labor force participation that occurred later.

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  • Carro, Jesús M. & Machado, Matilde P. & Mora, Ricardo, 2014. "Transmission of preferences and beliefs about female labor market participation : direct evidence on the role of mothers," UC3M Working papers. Economics we1421, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Economía.
    • Handle: RePEc:cte:werepe:we1421
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    Cited by:

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    2. Mine Durman-Aslan, 2020. "Female Labor Force Participation in Turkey: The Role of the Intergenerational Links," Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) halshs-02900982, HAL.
    3. Mine Durman-Aslan, 2020. "Female Labor Force Participation in Turkey: The Role of the Intergenerational Links," Post-Print halshs-02900982, HAL.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Female labor market participation;

    JEL classification:

    • J22 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Time Allocation and Labor Supply
    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
    • J12 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Marriage; Marital Dissolution; Family Structure

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