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Title: Career and Family Choices of Women: A Dynamic Analysis of Labor Force Participation, Schooling, Marriage, and Fertility Decisions
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Sheran, Michelle Elizabeth |
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Career and Family Choices of Women: A Dynamic Analysis of Labor Force Participation, Schooling, Marriage, and Fertility Decisions Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Virginia, 2001. DAI-A 62/07, p. 2501, Jan 2002 Cohort(s): NLSY79 Publisher: UMI - University Microfilms, Bell and Howell Information and Learning Keyword(s): Education; Family Studies; Fertility; Labor Supply; Life Cycle Research; Marriage; Women's Studies This paper formulates and estimates a dynamic labor supply model in which marriage, fertility, and education are choice variables. Specifically, I model the behavior of women as a finite horizon, discrete time, discrete choice, dynamic programming problem. Each period, each woman maximizes the present value of her utility over a known finite horizon by choosing her employment status, marital status, whether to use contraception, and whether to attend school. The dynamics of these choices are captured by various forms of state and duration dependence. Uncertainty in the model comes from the imperfect control women have over births and from a choice-specific random shock to utility each period. Women choose different career and family life-cycle paths because of the realizations of these uncertainties and also because they have different tastes. I estimate the structural parameters of the model using maximum likelihood estimation techniques with data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Because I model so many choices each period, estimation is computationally expensive. This dissertation discusses techniques employed to reduce this computational cost. The structural parameter estimates are used to analyze the career and family paths women choose over their lifetimes, and to examine the impact on choices over time of a change in the cost of college, divorce laws, own income, the marriage "penalty", and the cost of childcare. |
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Bibliography Citation
Sheran, Michelle Elizabeth. Career and Family Choices of Women: A Dynamic Analysis of Labor Force Participation, Schooling, Marriage, and Fertility Decisions. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Virginia, 2001. DAI-A 62/07, p. 2501, Jan 2002. |