Essays on married women's labor participation

This dissertation empirically investigates the factors that affect the labor participation decisions of married women. In the first essay, mothers' labor participation decisions are investigated under diverse specifications of their education and economic status. First, as it is reported in the media, college graduated mothers show some tendency to opt-out of the labor market. Second, the elasticities of the labor participation with respect to the estimated market child care costs are inelastic for all specifications, and especially, the mothers without bachelor degrees have very small elasticities. Third, among the elasticities with respect to the existence of children of different ages, the elasticity with respect to the existence of toddler---not the existence of infants---is the greatest for collage graduated mothers. Mothers are inelastic with respect to the existence of any aged children in general.;In the second essay, the effect of a mortgage engagement in the married women's labor participation decision is estimated using two different models. The estimation finds a significant effect of mortgage payment on the labor participation of married women. To resolve the endogenous possibility of mortgage commitment in the labor decision, a simultaneous model is implemented in addition to a simple ordered Probit model. The simultaneous model confirms that the propensity of mortgage engagement affects the propensity of labor participation simultaneously, and vice versa. It is also found that there exists a negative correlation between labor participation and mortgage decisions.;The third essay reinforces and expands the findings from the second chapter. In addition to estimate a simple logit panel model, a simultaneous panel equation model is estimated using maximum simulated likelihood for three-period panel data. The negative correlations between the labor participation and mortgage decisions are also found and the propensity of mortgage engagement affects the propensity of working in every period significantly. The hypothesis of exogenous mortgage decision is tested and the null hypothesis is rejected.