Female labor force participation, education and economic development

This dissertation consists of two essays on female labor force participation ratres and women's education over the course of economic development. The first portion makes a theoretical contribution by developing a general dynamic model which goes a long way in explaining several key trends observed in the U.S. data. The second portion examines more closely the determinants of female labor force participation and empirically documents the U-shaped relationship between the participation rare and the level of per capita income using several estimation techniques. It also looks at the relationship between women's labor force participation, education and economic growth.; "A dynamic model of female labor force participation and human capital investment". In this paper I develop a dynamic model of human capital investment and labor force participation which I use to explain several key stylized facts about women's education and work found in the data. The main underlying assumption of the model is that in traditional economies there are economies of scope between household and market production. The stylized facts which the model replicates are; the U-shaped path of married women's labor force participation' rate, the relationship between market work of women and urbanization, the change in the education of women in the labor force relative to those outside of it, the magnitude and sign of income and wage effects, and the education gap in underdeveloped economies between men and women.; "Female education, labor force participation and growth: Explaining a puzzle in empirical growth research". One of the puzzling findings in empirical growth research has been the insignificant, or even negative, relationship between female education and growth. While most of the previous explanations for this phenomenon focus on potential data problems, in this paper I explain the result as arising out the interaction of economic forces. Specifically, a good portion of women who get secondary and tertiary level education never enter the labor force. This results in a misspecification of the steady state and biased coefficients on the female education variable. I first examine the economic, social and cultural determinants of female labor force participation. Then I reproduce the standard growth regression while controlling for labor force participation, fertility and age dependency ratios. I find that female education has a positive effect on economic growth in countries with high female labor force participation and low age dependency ratio. I show that the results are robust with regard to specification and econometric technique used.