Working Paper: NBER ID: w25311
Authors: Masao Fukui; Emi Nakamura; J. N. Steinsson
Abstract: Business cycle recoveries have slowed in recent decades. This slowdown comes entirely from female employment: as women’s employment rates converged towards men’s over the course of the past half-century, the growth rate of female employment slowed. But does the slowdown in the growth of female employment rates translate into a slowdown for overall employment rates? The degree to which women “crowd out” men in the labor market is a sufficient statistic for this question. We estimate the extent of crowding out across states, and find that it is small. We then develop a general equilibrium model of the female convergence process featuring home production and show that our cross-sectional crowding out estimate provides a powerful diagnostic statistic for aggregate crowding out. Our model implies that 60-75% of the slowdown in recent business cycle recoveries can be explained by female con-vergence.
Keywords: Female Employment; Business Cycle; Crowding Out; Gender Convergence
JEL Codes: E24; E32; J21
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| female employment rates (J21) | overall employment recoveries (J68) |
| female employment rates (J21) | male employment growth (J49) |
| female convergence (J16) | nature of business cycle recoveries (E32) |
| overall employment rates (J68) | female employment rates (J21) |
| gender-neutral shocks (J16) | estimates of crowding out (E62) |