Cultural Change as Learning: The Evolution of Female Labor Force Participation over a Century

摘要

This article modeled the joint dynamics of married women's labor force participation and cultural change. In the model, married women compared the benefits of increased consumption from labor earnings with the expected utility cost of working. This cost was unknown, and women's beliefs about it evolved endogenously over time in a Bayesian fashion. I showed that a simple model with these features, calibrated to key statistics from the later part of the twentieth century, generates a time trend of married women's LFP that is roughly similar to the historical one in the United States over the last 120 years. Furthermore, a mapping of the evolution of social beliefs in the model was shown to follow a path that is similar to the poll data.