Cross-National Comparisons of the Labour Force Participation of Women Married to Unemployed Men.

This paper estimates a cross-sectional model of married women's labor-force participation for five countries--Britain, Denmark, the United States, Sweden, and Ireland--using data from the 1980s. The model includes a linearized budget constraint and an instrumented wage variable. Dummy variables were entered for the benefit regimes that unemployed husbands were experiencing. The five countries between them had a range of means-tested and other benefit regimes for unemployed men. The results suggest that non-means-tested regimes do not affect wives' participation whereas means-tested regimes all lower wives participation rates, given their characteristics. Coauthors are Siv Gustafsson, Nina Smith, and Tim Callan. Copyright 1995 by Royal Economic Society.