THE LABOR FORCE DECISIONS OF MARRIED FEMALE TEACHERS: A COMMENT.

Baqueiro, Armando J.; Breen, James J.; Mead, David E.; Wise, Donald E.

This article presents a model of the labor force participation of female teachers. In a recent paper, Wendy Lee Gramm presented a model of the labor force participation of female teachers. Her innovation is the use of linear discriminant analysis to predict membership in three groups: non-workers, part-time workers, and full-time workers. Gramm uses the ages of the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth child as five variables in her discriminant functions. She acknowledges that there is a problem of discontinuity when a family has no children and solves the problem by restricting the sample to families with children. Author has two criticisms of this procedure. First, since not all families will have five children, the existence of discontinuity has not been eliminated. Second, since age of 1st child refers to the oldest or first born child, the age of the youngest child, certainly the most important child in the labor force decision of a mother, will not always appear as the same variable. This procedure wastes much of the explanatory power in what may be the most important variable in the participation decision of married women.

ECONOMETRIC models; LABOR supply; LABOR market; WOMEN employees; DISCRIMINANT analysis; TEACHERS; DECISION making; FAMILIES; CHILDREN

Review of Economics & Statistics, 1976, Vol 58, Issue 2, p241

0034-6535

Academic Journal

10.2307/1924034