TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Schettkat, Ronald
AU  - Yocarini, Lara
        TI  - Education Driving the Rise in Dutch Female Employment: Explanations for the Increase in Part-time Work and Female Employment in the Netherlands, Contrasted with Germany
        PY  - 2001/Dec/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 407
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/index.php/publications/dp407
        AB  - Over the last 15 years, the Netherlands has experienced a tremendous jobs boom, mainly in
services and female employment. This has often been related to changes in the Dutch
institutional environment. Using a model which allows for direct utility of work, we find that
institutional arrangements like the tax and pension system – often cited as a cause of the
Dutch employment boom - contributed only marginally, if at all, to the rise in female labor
supply. The increasing proportion of women with higher education and a high valuation of
market work were the two main causes of rising female participation in the labor force. In
addition, greater flexibility in work schedules (part-time work) has relaxed a demand
constraint, allowing more women to participate in the labor market.
We find:
- that the increased number of women with higher education has contributed substantially
to the rise in female labor force participation;
- that it was only in the 1990s that the "behavioral" component contributed as much to
rising female labor force participation as the "structural" (educational) component;
- that there is no evidence that institutional specifics or the change in institutional
arrangements (taxes and pensions) favored female labor force participation or that they
provided strong incentives for part-time work;
- that the work orientation of Dutch women is stronger than that of German women but that
there is no evidence of a substantial increase in work orientation during the 1990s;
- that there is no evidence that women were previously demand-constrained in the sense
that they desired to work part-time but were prevented by a scarcity of part-time work.
        KW  - demand for labor
KW  - Employment
KW  - economics of gender
KW  - employment structure
KW  - time allocation and labor supply
KW  - human capital
        ER  -