TY  - JOUR
AU  - Fogli,Alessandra
AU  - Veldkamp,Laura
TI  - Nature or Nurture? Learning and the Geography of Female Labor Force Participation
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 14097
PY  - 2008
Y2  - June 2008
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14097
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14097.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Alessandra Fogli
University of Minnesota
1925 Fourth Street South
Minneapolis, MN 55455
E-Mail: afogli@umn.edu

Laura Veldkamp
Stern School of Business
New York University
44 W Fourth Street,Suite 7-77
New York, NY 10012
Tel: 212/998-0527
Fax: 212/995-4218
E-Mail: lveldkam@stern.nyu.edu
AB  - One of the most dramatic economic transformations of the past century has been the entry of women into the labor force. While many theories explain why this change took place, we investigate the process of transition itself. We argue that local information transmission generates changes in participation that are geographically heterogeneous, locally correlated and smooth in the aggregate, just like those observed in our data. In our model, women learn about the effects of maternal employment on children by observing nearby employed women. When few women participate in the labor force, data is scarce and participation rises slowly. As information accumulates in some regions, the effects of maternal employment become less uncertain, and more women in that region participate. Learning accelerates, labor force participation rises faster, and regional participation rates diverge. Eventually, information diffuses throughout the economy, beliefs converge to the truth, participation flattens out and regions become more similar again. To investigate the empirical relevance of our theory, we use a new county-level data set to compare our calibrated model to the time-series and geographic patterns of participation.
ER  -