The Role of Part-Time Work in Women's Labor Market Choices over Time
基于九年面板数据，分析女性在兼职、全职和不工作三种状态间的动态转换模式，检验兼职是否作为重返全职工作的过渡桥梁，并探究影响状态转换的因素。
At any point in time over the last decade, approximately 37 percent of nonelderly adult women were not employed, while 18 percent worked part-time and 45 percent worked full time. While much research has explored the static labor market participation and hours decisions of women,1 there has been almost no exploration of how the pattern of labor market involvement varies among individual women over time. Is there one group of women who always work full time, and another that is always out of the labor market? Or do most individual women move between different levels of labor market involvement over time? Part-time work may be particularly important in labor market dynamics. It has been suggested that part-time work provides a bridge or a stepping-stone into fulltime employment for women who have been absent from the labor market. Yet, knowing little about the dynamics of individual labor supply, we do not know if most part-timers are in that state transitionally, or if they are permanently involved in part-time work. This paper focuses on labor market changes over a nine-year period among a sample of adult women. The questions it addresses are: 1) What are the patterns of labor market involvement that we find among individual women over time? 2) What role does part-time work play in the dynamic patterns of women's labor market involvement, and is there evidence that part-time work is a more transitional category than full-time work or nonwork? 3) What factors induce women to move between part-time work, full-time work, and nonwork?