Female participation, workers' sectoral choice, and household poverty: The effects of Argentina's structural reforms during the 1990's

Opinions differ concerning the impact of globalization and the policies of openness and liberalization on (un)employment, wages, poverty, and income distribution. This dissertation contributes to the debate by focusing on three issues related to the labor market and the policy changes of the 1990s: female labor force participation, the determination of sector of work, and the effects of trade liberalization on poverty and income distribution.; The first essay focuses on the effect of a husband's unemployment on his wife's labor supply decisions---the Added Worker Effect (AWE). The essay analyzes this effect in the context of a developing country like Argentina that does not have a large unemployment insurance program nor perfect capital markets and faced a number of policy changes and external real shocks. Rather than use an ad hoc formulation, the labor supply response is derived in a bargaining-consistent framework that includes involuntary unemployment. The results using a cross-section analysis show a strong, positive, and statistically significant AWE, in contrast to results from similar work in developed countries. The effect was stronger after the reforms of the early 1990s and varied by industry.; The second essay expands on the industry effects from the first essay. A multi-normal logit sectoral choice model is used to estimate the probabilities of working in nine different sectors in 1993 and in the post-reform year 1998. The results show that the structural reform strategy had statistically significant effects on the distribution of workers across different tradable and non-tradable sectors over time and on the effects of demographic characteristics on these probabilities.; The final essay incorporates the results from the second essay into an econometric microsimulation model of household income generation that is itself combined with an economy-wide model of Argentina in 1993. The new macro-micro model examines the effects of a generalized trade liberalization scenario on poverty and income distribution under six different labor and capital market assumptions. The different assumptions do have an effect on the simulated welfare results. Overall, the more realistic scenarios that do not assume full employment of labor show the benefits of domestic and worldwide trade liberalization.