In spite of oil wealth, modernization, and high female educational attainment, the International Labor Organization cites female labor force participation in Kuwait as lower than other high-income countries, world averages, many non-Arab Islamic countries, and some gulf countries such as Qatar and the UAE. These statistics suggest a lack of female participation and agency in development of Kuwaiti society. As Kuwait and other gulf countries create economic strategies to move from dependency on natural resources to the development of skilled and innovative labor, the gap between high educational attainment and low labor force participation must be explored. With a grounded theory approach, this study uses statistical analysis and other secondary data, along with ethnographic methods of observation and in-depth interview with over 56 participants, to identify the social, economic, and political forces shaping the demand and supply of female labor in Kuwait. This research argues that increasing a womenâ"u20ac™s freedom (capability + agency) to participate economically, as well as politically and socially, increases their wellbeing and the sustainable development of their country. Therefore, research also considers Kuwaiti female agency in society for overall participation in sustainable development. To foundationally inform this study, interviews and observations seek a basic understanding of the Kuwaiti woman's experiences, as well as her definitions and perceptions of freedom. Interestingly, research finds two administrations in Kuwait record female LFP at least 18% higher than ILO estimates - discovery backed up by interviews and observations. These numbers not only include the high number of non-Kuwaiti female workers, but Kuwaiti women working in public, private, and informal markets. In addition, the number of Kuwaiti women entrepreneurs in home-based and other small businesses is increasing and becoming important to the economy, but is largely undocumented - suggesting female LFP in Kuwait may even be higher than administrations report. These findings suggest significantly greater female participation in the labor market than reported by international organizations, contradicting stereotypical views of disempowered Middle Eastern women - a view perhaps too often accepted without question by western research and society. Implications of research show potential for growth in the Kuwaiti female labor market within the private sector. / 1 / Shea Bradley Garrison

This paper aims at exploring senior-aged labor force participation in both OECD countries and Taiwan, covering the aspects of the historical trends and transition, the dominant factors influencing participation status, the prevailing measures in practice and cross-country comparison. In the process of this study, secondary data including book, journals, article, news clips and statistical reports were collected and analyzed. The fast growing trends of ageing and low birth rate are supposed to bring about labor supply shortage and impact our economic growth for the years to come. Besides, employment and social policies and practices that discourage work at an older age effectively deny older workers’ choice in when and how they retire. This will result in a waste of valuable human resources and has become a top global issue. In conformity with the fast growing ageing population, more and more ageing labor force is projected to be infused into the labor market so as to support continuous economic development. However, ways to facilitate this group’s willingness of continuous work to sustain the aggregate labor supply are considered even a more tremendous issue. With the efforts made by the government as well as support from both employers and employees, task on the reform of pension system and other parts of social welfare system, abolishment of age discrimination, flexibility of employment protection rules and working hours, and enhancement of job training should be carried out promptly and efficiently. / This paper aims at exploring senior-aged labor force participation in both OECD countries and Taiwan, covering the aspects of the historical trends and transition, the dominant factors influencing participation status, the prevailing measures in practice and cross-country comparison. In the process of this study, secondary data including book, journals, article, news clips and statistical reports were collected and analyzed. The fast growing trends of ageing and low birth rate are supposed to bring about labor supply shortage and impact our economic growth for the years to come. Besides, employment and social policies and practices that discourage work at an older age effectively deny older workers’ choice in when and how they retire. This will result in a waste of valuable human resources and has become a top global issue. In conformity with the fast growing ageing population, more and more ageing labor force is projected to be infused into the labor market so as to support continuous economic development. However, ways to facilitate this group’s willingness of continuous work to sustain the aggregate labor supply are considered even a more tremendous issue. With the efforts made by the government as well as support from both employers and employees, task on the reform of pension system and other parts of social welfare system, abolishment of age discrimination, flexibility of employment protection rules and working hours, and enhancement of job training should be carried out promptly and efficiently.

Over the last twenty years we have seen an increasing use of in-work tax subsidies to encourage labor supply among low-income groups. In Sweden, a non-targeted earned income tax credit was introduced in 2007, and was reinforced in 2008, 2009 and 2010. The stated motive of the reform was to boost employment; in particular to provide incentives for individuals to go from unemployment to, at least, part-time work. In this paper we try to analyze the extensive margin labor supply effects of the Swedish earned income tax credit reform up to 2008. For identification we exploit the fact that the size of the tax credit, as well as the resulting average tax rate, is a function of the municipality of residence and income if working. However, throughout the analysis we find placebo effects that are similar in size to the estimated reform effects. In addition, the results are sensitive with respect to how we define employment, which is especially true when we analyze different subgroups such as men and women, married and singles. Our conclusion is that the identifying variation is too small and potentially endogenous and that it is therefore not possible to use this variation to perform a quasi-experimental evaluation of the Swedish EITC-reform.

This thesis analysed the effect of female labor force participation rate (FLFPR) on economicgrowth and included changes in male labor force participation rate (MLFPR) to help improve thepower of the model. Here, three robust regressions were used on the sample of 16 Latin Countries(Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala,Honduras, Venezuela, RB, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, El Salvador) for theperiod of 1995-2015 in order to identify the effect of each key variable when tested separately andwhen tested together. According to the results, the coefficients of FLFPR and MLFPR are differentand also the addition of MLFPR to the model that has an explanatory variable FLFPR anddependent variable economic growth clearly improves the predicting power of the model and helpsobtain better coefficients. It was also identified that FLFPR has a strong positive relationship witheconomic growth, while MLFPR has a negative effect on the latter. Finally, the existence of u-shape relationship between FLFPR and economic growth was reaffirmed in this thesis, while itwas also shown that MLFPR does not have a u-shape relationship with the economic growth.

In tandem with the economic development in Taiwan, female participation in the labor market has been growing. In 1980, female labor force participation rate in Taiwan was only 39.25% but it increased about 10 percentage points in the following 27 years, rising to 49.44% in 2007. Compared with advanced countries in the OECD, female labor force participation in Taiwan still has a long way to go. This research draws on past patterns in Taiwan and OECD member countries to understand the development of international female labor force participation. The purposes of this study are to understand the trend of female labor force participation in OECD countries and in Taiwan, and to know the impact of the new economy and atypical work on female labor force participation. From this study, it is obvious that internationally female labor force participation has grown from 1980 to 2006. By age groups, it indicates that the highest female labor force participation rate in OECD countries was in the age group of 40-44 while in Taiwan it was in the age group of 25-29. By the level of educational attainment, it brings out that education has improved female labor force participation since the highest female labor force participation rates were in the group of tertiary education in OECD countries, as well as in Taiwan. By sector and occupation, the statistics show that more and more females are employed in the service sector, working as service workers and sales workers. Moreover, the knowledge-based economy and the atypical jobs have lowered the entry barriers of labor market for females and have improved female labor force participation.

Thesis advisor: James E. Lubben / Productive aging is a new and evolving conceptual model that emphasizes the antecedents and consequences of productivity in later life. Proponents of productive aging claim that productive activity in later life is associated with a number of benefits for individuals, communities, and societies, but this assumption has not been widely tested at the country level. In the context of an adapted model of productive aging, the present study identifies the cross-national predictors of and relationship between one form of productivity (viz., labor force participation) and one aspect of well-being (viz., longevity) among older adults. Random effects models with pooled cross-sections and path analysis were used to analyze potential relationships with data from several international data sources. The complete cross-national longitudinal dataset consists of variables measured at five time points or during intervals centered at these time points (i.e., 1980, 1985, 1990, 1995, and 2000) for each of thirty countries that belong to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The present study makes one particularly important and new contribution to the cross-national literature on productivity and longevity; the study suggests that work in later life strongly influences life expectancy among older adults, but that some important gender differences should be noted. The present study also suggests that public policy plays a very important role in country level labor force participation rates and life expectancy. More specifically, higher levels of public spending on social issues are associated with lower rates of labor force participation and higher life expectancies. Finally, the present study confirms that the adapted model of productivity provides a solid foundation for cross-national analyses of labor force participation and life expectancy, but highlights the importance of analyzing male and female behavior and outcomes separately. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Social Work. / Discipline: Social Work.

How do the experiences of women in the labor market differ from the experiences of men? Do economic crises affect their labor market decisions differently? Economists have investigated the responses of women to specific moments of crisis in Argentina – the country lends itself well to this analysis, as the last three decades of its history have seen both economic growth and financial collapse. With the crisis literature in mind, I investigate trends in female labor force participation rates in Argentina between 1980-2003, finding that while some evidence supports the “added worker effect” hypothesis, more research must be done to understand the relationships between female labor force participation and male and female unemployment.

This dissertation examines the effect of changes in the stock of human capital on the labor force participation decision of women aged 25-54. Without the option of homebased work, some women choose to leave the labor market and stay at home temporarily for family reasons. Working women realize that time out of the labor force could impose penalties on their work careers. This is because during the break, they do not accumulate any new human capital while the existing job skills continuously depreciate. Nowadays, home-based work becomes possible for many jobs because rapid development in personal computers and advances in information and communications technology have reduced employers’ cost of offering home-based work arrangements. Working women can resolve the time conflict between demand for paid work and family responsibility by working from home. In a previous study, the home-based work decision depends on the fixed cost of working and potential home production. Women who are disabled, have small children, or live in rural areas are likely to work from home because they have high fixed costs of working and high potential home production. However, none of the existing studies applies the human capital theory of labor supply to the home-based work decision. Using data on the female labor force from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) of housing units from the 2000 U.S. Census, I estimate a nested logit model to examine the effects of expected costs of non-participation, in terms of forgone earnings, forgone human capital accumulation and human capital depreciation, on women’s labor force participation decision. I find that, other things being equal, women aged 25 to 44 who have potentially high human capital accumulation and high human capital depreciation are likely to stay in the labor force. In the case that the value of their home time is so high that they choose to stay at home, they prefer to work for pay at home than to be out of the labor force.

The first chapter relates the size of the present-day LGBT population to the discovery of gold during the nineteenth century gold rushes. Comparing the surroundings of gold rush counties to other mining counties, we find that there are currently 15% more same-sex couples in former gold rush counties and that residents of these counties have more favorable attitudes toward homosexuality. Gold rush counties were initially isolated, mostly uninhabited and lacked strong formal institutions, which helped shaping pro-LGBT attitudes. Examining channels of persistence, we provide empirical evidence for selective migration and the lack of strong religious institutions. The second chapter examines the impact of gender focused labor legislation on women’s labor force participation and economic empowerment. We rely on historical legislative acts passed by state legislatures and exploit whether or not states passed regulatory laws regulating overall and industry specific employment and work conditions for women, night work laws and labor laws requiring provision of seats for working women. We exploit the fact that not all states enacted these laws as well as the variation in the timing of enactment of such laws. Our results show that women in comparison to men in treated states are more likely to be in the labor force post introduction of night work laws in comparison to control states. We also document the effect of industry-specific labor policies on women’s likelihood to be employed in the affected industry and in higher-wage occupations within the industry of interest. Policy implications of our findings endorse the adoption of labor laws in favor of women to advocate their empowerment through a higher involvement in the labor market and financial independence. The third chapter tests the doctrine of first effective settlement by relating early settlers’ culture to within state variation in gender norms in the United States. In 1973, the cultural geographer Wilbur Zelinsky postulated that the distinctive traits of early settlers at initial stages of institutional development may be crucial for cultural formation. I capture settlers’ culture using past female labor force participation, women’s suffrage and financial rights at their place of origin. I document the distinctive characteristics of settlers’ populations and provide suggestive evidence in support of the spatial (across locations) and vertical (over time) transmission of gender norms. My results show that women’s labor supply is higher, in both the short and long run, in U.S. counties that historically hosted a larger settler population originating from places with favorable gender attitudes. My findings shed new light on the importance of immigrants’ characteristics and their countries/states of origin for cultural formation in hosting societies.

Female labor force participation is an essential factor for the economic andsocio-economic development of nations. Closing gender gaps on the Africanlabor market is thus not just a fairness issue, it is good economics. This thesisuses panel data of 35 Sub-Saharan Africa countries over the period 1995-to2019, to analyse the nexus between globalization and female labor forceparticipation (FLFP). The investigation is done at the level of the economy asa whole, and then across three economic sectors; agriculture, manufacturingand service. To depart from existing literature, FLFP is operationalized in thisstudy as relative (to males) labor force participation and relative employmentacross sectors. The empirical evidence provided is based on fixed effectregressions, which provide close to zero effects systematically. These resultsprove a weak relationship suggesting a weak correlation between allglobalization dynamics and FLFP in Sub-Saharan Africa. These findings arebroadly consistent with the minority strand of the literature supporting theinsignificance and/or negative insignificance of globalization on FLFP andrelative employment outcomes. It thus brings a new perspective to theliterature, wherein positive effects have been found on the relationshipbetween globalization and FLFP.. I try to argue the possible reasons for these findings. Policy implications arediscussed with an emphasis on how to promote women’s participation on thelabor market. Particularly, feasible policies which could absorb women intothe formal economic sectors.