Occupation and the labour market participation of women: why do some people trade down jobs when careers are interrupted?

Abstract

A dynamic structural discrete choice model of labour market participation, schooling and occupational choice is applied to data for women drawn from the British Cohort Study. It is established that, for relatively highly educated workers, the return attached to childrearing is higher in the part-time non-managerial work regime than in the part-time managerial work regime. As a consequence, following childbirth, many female managers switch to occupations that underutilise their skills.

Notes

¹ A somewhat more conventional multinomial logit analysis of male career choices, using this same dataset, is provided by Anyadike-Danes and McVicar (2005). These authors use optimal matching and cluster analysis to define a number of career path types, while the present analysis seeks to explain career paths in a dynamic context.

² Other recent papers that use this approach include Stinebrickner (2000, 2001), Imai and Keane (2004) and Lee (2005).

³ The A (Advanced) level qualification in the United Kingdom is typically taken by upper secondary school pupils at age 18.

⁴ In early runs of the model, a more sophisticated earnings determination mechanism than that implied by the above equations was estimated. Therein, the impact on earnings in each working regime of time spent in each other regime was evaluated by the addition of extra explanatory variables. Owing to collinearity between the explanatory variables, the performance of this model was poor, and so it is not reported here.