10.17889/E109682
Fernández, Raquel
Replication data for: Cultural Change as Learning: The Evolution of Female Labor Force Participation over a Century
ICPSR Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
2013
10.1257/aer.103.1.472
10.1257/aer.103.1.472
V0
This paper develops a learning model of cultural change to investigate why women's labor force participation (LFP) and attitudes toward women’s work both changed dramatically. In the model, women's beliefs about the long-run payoff from working evolve endogenously via an intergenerational learning process. This process generically generates the data's S-shaped LFP curve and introduces a novel role for wage changes via their effect on the speed of intergenerational learning. The calibrated model does a good job of replicating the evolution of female LFP in the United States over the last 120 years and finds that the new role for wages was quantitatively significant.