Female Labour Supply and Marital Status Decisions: A Life-Cycle Model
构建并估计了一个女性生命周期内婚姻状态与劳动参与决策的动态模型，发现婚姻效用随女性工资上升而下降、随丈夫收入上升而上升，而工作效用则相反；忽略婚姻状态的内生性会低估工资对女性劳动供给的影响。
This paper studies the interdependence between and the determinants of life-cycle marital status and labour force participation decisions of women. A dynamic utility maximization model is presented and estimated using longitudinal data on women from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. The MLE method employed, involves solving a dynamic programming problem. Further, a minimum distance estimator is proposed which allows for the incorporation of wage data in a computationally simple way. The estimates are used to predict changes in the life-cycle patterns of employment, marriage and divorce due to differences in education, race, the female's earnings and her (potential) husband's earnings. The estimation results indicate that the utility gains to marriage are decreasing in the female's wage rate and increasing in her (potential) husband's earnings, while the opposite is found for gains to working. Ignoring the endogeneity of marital status decisions is shown to lead to an underestimation of own and husband's wage effects on female labour supply.