The Impact of Financial Crises on Female Labour

Abstract

This article focuses on the impact of financial crises on female labour participation and unemployment. After a review of the literature, we present new econometric results on the impact of past financial crises. We employ the random effects panel estimation method on a large set of countries for the period 1980-2005. The regressions include many control variables, and obtain also results on the severity of financial crises for economies at different levels of development and the persistence of the impact on female unemployment. For robustness checks and sensitivity analysis, alternative definitions of crises have been used. Although we are aware of the peculiarities of the last crisis -especially its global nature -we think that our results on past financial crises, together with key evidences on the last crisis, can favour a better definition of appropriate policy actions.Cet article s'inte´resse a`l'impact des crises financie`res sur la participation des femmes sur le marched u travail et sur le taux de choˆmage fe´minin. Apre`s avoir passe´en revue la litte´rature sur le sujet, nous pre´sentons de nouveaux re´sultats e´conome´triques sur l'impact des crises financie`res passe´es. Nous utilisons la me´thode d'estimation des effets ale´atoires sur donne´es de panel concernant un ensemble de pays sur la pe´riode entre 1980 et 2005. Nous inte´grons dans le mode`le de re´gression de nombreuses variables de controˆle, et obtenons e´galement des re´sultats concernant la se´ve´rite´de l'impact des crises financie`res sur les e´conomies, aux diffe´rents niveaux de de´veloppement, et sur la persistance de leurs effets sur le choˆmage fe´minin. Pour tester la robustesse des re´sultats et analyser leur sensibilite´nous utilisons d'autres de´finitions possibles du terme 'crise'. Bien que nous ayons conscience des particularite´s de la dernie`re crise, et notamment de sa nature globale, nous estimons que nos re´sultats relatifs aux crises financie`res passe´es, associe´s a`des e´le´ments cle´s concernant la crise re´cente, peuvent aider a`e´laborer des mesures politiques approprie´es.

Employment and employment conditions in the current economic crisis in Croatia

“…Accor ding to evidence from past crises, labor force participation of women is more li kely to increase for low-income households and in low-income countries, for less educated and older women. This is in line with some results from Signorelli, Choudhry and Marelli (2012) who analyze the impact of past financial crises (between 1980 and 2005) for a large number of countries and try to assess the li kely impact of the present crisis on female employment indirectly (given the time lag in data and lack of more explicit studies), by considering some aspects of this crisis and the results for the past episodes. They find that the impact of past crises on the participation rate of women is negative and significant only for high-income and upper middle-income countries.…”

Ukrainian Migrants in the European Union: a Comparative Study of the Czech Republic and Italy

“…The recent economic crisis further deepened the welfare effect of migration and impacted on migrants' wages (see e.g. Signorelli et al, 2012).…”

Technological Advancement and the Evolving Gender Identities: A Focus on the Level of Female Economic Participation in Sub-Saharan Africa

“…The choice of the indicators is consistent with Signorelli et al (2012) and Elborgh-Woytek (2013). The female labour force participation rate represents the proportion of females in the labour force that are aged 15 to 64 by the total working age population (World Bank, 2016).…”

“…Second, this variable has gained credence in some studies focused on female economic involvement: they find that the employment status of women is a key mechanism for promoting gender equity, which can leverage change in other domains (Seguino, 2007;Ridgeway, 2011;Kabeer et al, 2013). Also, Signorelli and Marelli (2012) considered unemployment status of women in addressing the impact of the global economic crisis on female economic participation, using a global dataset. Clearly, the results of the robustness test are the same as in the earlier estimation, as most of the variables of interest maintain a positive and significant relationship with the new explained variable.…”