Against the wind: Labor force participation of women in Iran.

摘要

Women in Iran have garnered extraordinary achievements in the last two and a half decades. Fertility rate has fallen in one of the largest and fastest transitions in modern human history. Meanwhile, education levels have consistently increased, to the extent that currently, women who are in their late 20s are more educated than their male counterparts. But still, female labor force participation (FLFP) rates remain at the low levels of two decades ago (FLFP puzzle), a fact which has led many researchers to suggest that FLFP is inelastic to economic forces.;In this manuscript, I analyze some economic characteristics of the women's labor supply in Iran and show that female labor force participation is elastic, at least for some women and with respect to some economic forces. In the second chapter, I provide the reduced form as well as structural estimations of women's "observed" labor force participation and hours worked in Iran. In both models, I show that the results are compatible with the basic predictions of economic theory and the empirical evidence from other countries. For instance, women with higher education are more likely to participate; age profile of participation is concave and has its peak between the ages of 30 to 50; more assets leads to less participation; and presence of more adult men decreases the likelihood of participation while more adult women increases it. Moreover, similar to the results for the developed countries, the structural estimations show that Iranian women's participation in urban areas, regardless of marital status, is highly elastic with respect to wages, while their hours worked is in-elastic.;In Chapter 3, I argue that despite its rigidities, "observed" FLFP did, for some women, respond to economic pressures induced by macroeconomic instabilities. Looking at the Iranian minor economic crisis of 1994-95, I show that, controlling for individual fixed effects, married rural women and unmarried urban women, between the ages of 21 to 65, joined the labor market at an increase of about 8.4 and 8.9 percentage points respectively (30% and 36% rise). During the same period, married urban women did not change their participation rates. These results are compatible with the hypothesis that marriage considerably limits urban women's responsiveness to economic forces ("marriage lock" theory). On the other hand, the high wage elasticities of participation for urban married women, estimated in Chapter 2, may contradict this hypothesis. No change in hours worked, during the crisis, was found for any group of women. I discuss my future research in Chapter 4.