Marriage Markets and Married Women’s Labor Force Participation

Based on a model that views men and women as participants in competitive markets for women’s home production time, we predict that the scarcer women are relative to men, the less married women are likely to participate in the labor force. The magnitude of this effect is expected to depend on married women’s educational attainment. We use time series for four U.S. regions to test our prediction. As hypothesized, we find that an increase in the growth rate of the sex ratio results in a decline in the labor force participation growth rate of married women. However, the sex ratio effect is attenuated the greater the growth rate in college-educated wives.