The effect of household appliances on female labor force participation: Evidence from microdata

Abstract

We estimate the e¤ect of household appliance ownership on the labor force participation rate of married women using micro-level data from the 1960 and 1970 U.S. Censuses. In order to identify the causal e¤ect of home appliance ownership on married women's labor force participation rates, our empirical strategy exploits both time-series and cross-sectional variation in these two variables. To control for endogeneity, we instrument a married woman's ownership of an appliance by the average ownership rate for that appliance among single women living in the same U.S. state. Single women's labor force participation rates did not increase between 1960 and 1970. By our estimation, the di¤usion of household appliances accounts for about forty percent of the observed increase in married women's labor force participation rates during the 1960's.

The Distribution of the Gender Wage Gap

“…The utility from home production is modelled in a symmetric way. The economic literature has linked movements of women into the labour market -or, more specifically, into market occupations -to changes in fertility and contraceptive technology (Katz and Goldin, 2000;Costa, 2000;Cruces and Galiani, 2007); changes in the marriage market (Grossbard-Shechtman and Neuman, 1988;Fernández and Wong, 2014;Greenwood et al, 2016); changes in social norms and attitudes towards women's work (Ronald R. Rindfuss, 1996;Costa, 2000;Fernández et al, 2004;Goldin, 2006;Fernández, 2013); and improvements in capital and technologies used for home production activities (Costa, 2000;Greenwood et al, 2005;de V. Cavalcanti and Tavares, 2008;Coen-Pirani et al, 2010). we do not specify how the underlying mechanism that explain the rise of female labour force participation interact with the demand side of the model.…”

Maids, Appliances and Couples' Housework: The Demand for Inputs to Domestic Production

“…Most of the scant research to date on the domestic help industry (Suen ; Cortés and Pan ; Cortés and Tessada —using microdata on foreign maids) and on home appliances (Cavalcanti and Tavares ; Coen‐Pirani et al . ) focuses on the positive impact these alternative inputs to domestic production have on women's labour supply. Cortés and Tessada () find, combining information from different data sources, that the greater availability of maid services, instrumented with migration flows, has increased the labour supply of high‐earning women by between 4 and 20 minutes per week.…”

Social norms as a barrier to women’s employment in developing countries

“…Bharati et al (2019) evaluates the Indonesian government's Conversion to Liquefied Petroleum Gas program and finds that the switch to a labor-saving cooking fuel increased female labor force participation. In the US context, owning more household appliances is associated with higher female employment rates (Coen-Pirani et al 2010).…”