Abstract
We explore how wives, children, and other relatives contribute to family-owned businesses as unpaid workers. As they are unpaid, their contribution to the family’s economic assimilation is not captured in traditional human capital earnings models. We find that a husband’s self-employment status affects the wife’s decision to work in the labor market and often supersedes the effects of other husband-related characteristics typically found in female labor force participation models.
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Notes
- 1.
An exception to this statement is the Chinese. Also note that the statistics in Table 15.1 do not reveal to what extent adult relatives are unpaid laborers in homes with adult relatives; the reported statistics also reflect intergroup variations in the extent of live-in adult relatives. In a similar vein, the statistics do not examine unpaid labor from children who are old enough to work. As such, the reported statistics also reflect intergroup variations in the age structure of immigrant families. Future researchers will want to more carefully address these issues.
- 2.
As discussed below, Kim and Hurh find far higher levels of work participation by wives in the Korean businesses they studied than indicated by the census data.
- 3.
Note the relatively high percentage of Japanese women working as unpaid family workers. As a topic for further research, we suspect that this statistic represents the subset of families that are permanently attached to the U.S.
- 4.
The statistics in Table 15.4 are tabulated by the wife’s year of entry.
- 5.
There are, from this initial exploration, a number of empirical paths worth pursuing. Our estimates are based on a cross-section. Future researchers will want to explore the effects of husband’s self-employment on the wife’s propensity to work following cohorts, and if possible, individual families over time. Moreover, we have assumed in our analysis that the time-path effects are the same across immigrant groups.
- 6.
As with immigrants, few U.S.-born individuals report unpaid labor to the census. Analysis of 1980 census data reveals that 1.3% of U.S.-born, non-Hispanic white married women work as unpaid labor; among those with self-employed husbands, 6% report supplying unpaid labor to a family business. Yet, husband’s self-employment has a large negative effect on a native women’s propensity to work, perhaps reflecting greater household duties or the wife’s actual participation in the operation of a family business. Among U.S.-born non-Hispanic white married women who were not married to self-employed husbands, 60% reported working in 1980, compared with 52% of those with self-employed husbands. A husband’s self-employment or plans for a business may also increase a native women’s propensity to pursue paid work to financially support an entrepreneurial endeavor. These issues merit greater attention in models of female labor force participation.
References
Amemiya, T. “Qualitative Response Models: A Survey,” Journal of Economic Literature, vol. 19, December 1981.
Kim KC and Hurh WM. 1996. “Ethnic Resources Utilization of Korean Immigrant Entrepreneurs in the Chicago Minority Area,” in Immigrants and Immigration Policy: Individual Skills, Family Ties, and Group Identities, HO Duleep, PV Wunnava, eds. Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press.
Ngo, Hang-yue (1994) “The economic role of immigrant wives in Hong Kong.” International Migration, Vol. 32, No. 3, 403–23.
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Duleep, H., Regets, M.C., Sanders, S., Wunnava, P.V. (2020). Unpaid Family Labor. In: Human Capital Investment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47083-8_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47083-8_15
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