The U-Shaped Female Labor Force Function in Economic Development and Economic History
Open accessAbstract
The labor force participation rate of married women first declines and then rises as countries develop.Its U-shape is revealed both across the process of economic development and through the histories of currently advanced economies.The initial decline in the participation rate is due to the movement of production from the household, tmily farm, and small business to the wider market, and to a strong income effect But the income effect weakens and the substitution effect strengthens at some point.This paper explores why the change takes place and why the U-shape is traced ouL When women are poorly educated their only wage labor outside the home and family farm is in manual work, against which a strong social stigma exists.But when women are educated, particularly at the secondary level, they enter white-collar work, against which no social stigma exists.Data for more than one hundred countries and for United States history are used to explore the hypothesis of the U-shaped female labor force function.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Cited by
Sorted by citations
The Quiet Revolution That Transformed Women's Employment, Education, and Family
Goldin, C. (2006) · American Economic Review · doi:10.1257/000282806777212350 · Cited by 1,831 · see citing works
Self-citationThe economic consequences of reproductive health and family planning
Canning, D., & Schultz, T. P. (2012) · The Lancet · doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(12)60827-7 · Cited by 414 · see citing works
Flor, L. S., Friedman, J., Spencer, C. N., Cagney, J., Arrieta, A., Herbert, M. E., Stein, C., Mullany, E. C., Hon, J., Patwardhan, V., et al. (2022) · The Lancet · doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(22)00008-3 · Cited by 364 · see citing works
Drivers of Female Labour Force Participation in the OECD
(2013) · OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers · doi:10.1787/5k46cvrgnms6-en · Cited by 177 · see citing works
The demographical and economic factors affecting female labor force participation in Saudi Arabia
Alghamdi, S., & Shaheen, R. (2024) · Journal of Infrastructure Policy and Development · doi:10.24294/jipd.v8i6.3844 · Cited by 3 · see citing works
- Authors
- Goldin, C.
- Affiliations
- National Bureau of Economic Research (US)
- Corresponding author
- Goldin, Claudia
- ORCID
- Goldin, Claudia
- Venue
- National Bureau of Economic Research
- Publisher
- National Bureau of Economic Research
- Published
- 1994-04
- OpenAlex
- W1565154825
- Cited by
- 781
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 52 · 2025: 58 · 2024: 70 · 2023: 65 · 2022: 43 · 2021: 58 · 2020: 62 · 2019: 47 · 2018: 49 · 2017: 36 · 2016: 37 · 2015: 38 · 2014: 25 · 2013: 28 · 2012: 14
- Type
- report
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- doi.org
- Locations
- National Bureau of Economic Research (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- SSRN Electronic Journal (submittedVersion)
- National Bureau of Economic Research (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Gender Studies › Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Labor market dynamics and wage inequality
- Social Sciences › Gender Studies › Labour Market and Migration
- Keywords
- female labor force participation, married women, U-shaped relationship, economic development, household production, family farms, small business, income effects, substitution effect, women's education, social stigma, manual labor, white-collar work, economic history
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
