Abstract
A major development in the second half of last century was the strong increase in married women’s labour force participation in many OECD countries. In particular, in the Netherlands the time pattern was quite pronounced. To explain this pattern this paper develops a dynamic model of bandwagon effects in female labour force participation. The model is formulated in terms of social-group variables, but it is derived in a systematic (be it approximative) way from an underlying individual labour supply model. The non-linear bandwagon dynamics are shown to imply long-run elasticities of the participation rate with respect to wage rate and other exogenous variables which vary with the level of the participation rate according to a hump-shaped profile. This leads to a sigmoid shape of the time profile of the participation rate which is considerably “sharper” than the logistic shape implied by static labour supply models. Such a time profile accounts in a stylized way for the Dutch pattern.
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Vendrik, M.C.M. (2003). Bandwagon Effects on Female Labour Force Participation: An Application to the Netherlands. In: Cowan, R., Jonard, N. (eds) Heterogenous Agents, Interactions and Economic Performance. Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems, vol 521. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-55651-7_13
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